Abstract
A critical analysis is developed of the part that centrally initiated leadership development plays as a strategic lever for ensuring a steady supply of organizational leaders equipped and willing to meet the goals of widespread service improvement. Selected Bourdieusian conceptual tools are employed to illustrate how centrally initiated development of leaders operates as a form of ‘symbolic violence’: a covert means of perpetuating political elite domination. Organizational leaders misrecognize it as promoting their interest in expanding their influence because they are attracted by the opportunity it overtly offers to build their ‘capitals’. This process operates across two main administrative levels: the central (system) level and the organizational (local) level. The analysis is empirically grounded through the case of UK public services, drawing on a study of public service leaders, policymakers and representatives from national leadership development bodies in the United Kingdom. The findings illustrate how central policy elites endeavour to use leadership development to acculturate organizational leaders capable of responding favourably to a reconfigured and re-professionalized public service field. At the same time, organizational leaders consent to this through its perceived value in expanding their influence and developing their leader-related forms of capital.
Introducing the (self)persuasion game of elite leader inculcation
This article develops critical analysis of formal provision for leadership development, illustrated empirically by the case of UK public services. It reveals how centrally initiated elite leadership development may be employed for enhancing leaders’ influence, domination and organizational positioning within professionalized occupational fields. This article utilizes selected concepts of Bourdieu, in particular ‘symbolic violence’ and ‘capitals’, to highlight how centrally initiated elite leadership development serves as a means of maintaining domination in elite organizational fields.
The main contribution to knowledge is to portray how leadership development may entail a form of symbolic violence perpetrated by central policy leaders onto organizational-level leaders, and who in turn may be given the scope to perpetrate symbolic violence onto their own organizational members. Overall, this process represents central policy-level leaders’ endeavours to achieve service reform enhancement, and to ‘remote control’ leaders through elite forms of acculturation. However, organizational leaders consent to the symbolic violence inherent in formal leadership development as they perceive it to enhance their own organizational standing – principally through the acquisition of additional forms of capital and also facilitating their embodied dispositions as leaders. Developing leaders through symbolic violence entails a misrecognition among leaders that it ostensibly serves their interests and leader trajectories. As a result, organizational leaders unwittingly collude in affirming and legitimating the reproductive power of those who dominate them.
We focus on organizational leaders within the UK public services – those occupying the top formal positions in service provision organizations (plus aspirants among senior staff), central government policymakers and senior representatives of national leadership development bodies (NLDBs). This context is of particular relevance for exploring the breadth of relations encompassing centrally initiated leadership development and its links to organizational change, given the prevalence of formal leadership development linked with UK public service reform efforts.
In public administrative contexts, leadership development has been conceived as a key policy lever in the drive for service reform and organizational change (Hartley and Allison, 2000). Moreover, it has been utilized by policy-level leaders as a key political tool that serves to acculturate local-level leaders with requisite values, beliefs and dispositions in order for them to become transformational leaders and effective ‘change agents’ (Wallace et al., 2011). Yet, for formal leadership development to achieve this goal, it must receive support from, and acceptance among, leaders on the basis that it is in their wider organizational and personal career interests to undertake it. This must work principally by appealing to, and reinforcing, leaders’ cultural values and beliefs about their role as leaders and what they might need to enhance their leadership trajectories.
The critical perspective adopted here on centrally initiated leadership development highlights the role of formal provision as a highly political (and policy-driven) strategy for the mobilization of elite modes of action that may serve to reproduce desired centrally driven goals. We locate leadership development interventions within issues of power and the reproduction of elite forms of domination, emancipation and symbolic control. Among earlier critical accounts of leadership development are those that have looked at the content or process of provision itself (e.g. Ford and Harding, 2007), the disciplinary nature of leadership or management development (Brewis, 1996), the seductive structuring of leadership development (Sinclair, 2009) or the resistance of recipients to it (Currie, 1999). We take a broader perspective, critically examining the socio-structural relationships in which centrally initiated and influenced leadership development is enmeshed, and to which, it in turn contributes. Bourdieu’s intellectual apparatus enables us to contribute a relational account of leadership development to the emergent work on relational perspectives on leadership (Uhl-Bien, 2006).
Focussing on leadership development, occurring largely within the fields of practice rather than an external field, such as university-hosted management education, applies and extends the concerns with ideological reproduction expressed in critical management education studies that have previously utilized Bourdieusian concepts (e.g. Vaara and Fay, 2012; Whitley et al., 1981). In our empirical case, the notion of leader development is perhaps even more apposite given that much of the provision’s significance resides in the expansion of individual leaders’ scope for influence.
Our core claim is warranted, first, through an illustrative analysis of central policy elites’ discourses on leadership development as a key lever in building up organizational leaders’ capacity successfully to deliver front-line public services. Such capacity includes the proactive and creative response to reform pressures and the management of professional staff. Second, our core claim is further warranted through an account of senior service organization staff’s engagement with, and perceptions of, leadership development. We show how they perceive themselves to be supplied with the resources (to which we refer as forms of capital) for augmenting their organizational position, as leaders, and exerting influence and domination over peripheral organizational members. This focus diverges from more normative and pedagogical approaches to leadership development (and is focussed on centrally initiated leadership development rather than leadership development per se). However, it reveals how leadership development provision may socialize leaders towards particular ways of thinking and acting commensurate with their leader roles. These frames and actions both align leaders’ practices with the wider goals of service enhancement and create consent between elite actors within a wider field of struggle. The findings on which this article is based derive from a wider project on public service leaders’ self-perceptions as ‘change agents’ and their engagement in formal leadership development.
The following sections develop our argument. First, the Bourdieusian concepts underpinning the account are defined. Second, the context surrounding the centrally initiated leadership development forming our illustrative case is summarized. Third, the qualitative and inductive methodological approach for the investigation is outlined. Fourth, central leaders’ approaches are reported for promoting leadership development as a key lever for building leaders’ capacity. Fifth, the role of capitals is examined in depth: how leaders themselves perceive and engage with leadership development and their willingness to subject themselves to symbolic violence through the enhancement of capitals that potentially strengthen their leader positions and trajectories. Finally, conclusions are drawn about the insights that the application of Bourdieu’s ideas provide in understanding how the elite promotion of leadership development works by exploiting a confluence of interests between central (policy-level) leaders and organizational leaders and aspirants, such that the latter actively engage in their own domination by building up the capitals they need to dominate other members of their organizations.
Bourdieu and leadership development: symbolic violence for capital(s) gain
We draw selectively on Bourdieu’s conceptual tools to portray the production and reproduction of organizational elites through leadership development, here public service leaders in a shifting public service context. Bourdieu (1984, 1986, 2005) has deepened understanding of the links between various forms of power, domination and social positioning within different social fields, and how these are negotiated by social actors and mediated through acts of symbolic control. His approach grasps how social systems are reproduced through forms of domination and the mobilization of unequally held relational resources, or what he has termed ‘capital’.
Bourdieu’s ideas are increasingly applied in organizational analysis, particularly in exploring how actors are shaped by, and also shape, the organizational contexts in which they work (Golsorkhi et al., 2009; Ozbiglin and Tatli, 2005). Such analysis has helped capture salient issues around power relations, control and the mobilization of resources within complex and multilayered organizations. As Dobbin (2008) and Emirbayer and Johnson (2008) outline, Bourdieu’s conceptualization enables analysis of how this power play operates across multiple organizational levels and between competing organizational groups. In offering a predominately structurational approach to organizational life, Bourdieu has mapped dynamics between wider structural relationships of power, internal organizational contexts and individuals’ strategies for action (Kerr and Robinson, 2011). These strategies, sometimes unwittingly performed, assist in conserving or disrupting extant power relations. Organizational structures exist largely through actors’ construction (and reproduction) of negotiated forms of symbolic control and emancipation. Thus, Bourdieu’s attention to the symbolic dimension of organizational life illuminates the maintenance of organizational boundaries and how individuals’ actions serve to reproduce them.
Our investigation draws on Bourdieusian concepts with salience for the analysis of leadership development as it relates to the reproduction and legitimation of elite fields. The concept of social field is pertinent to studying complex professional organizations in referring to the structured social settings where power relations and acts of symbolic domination are played out. Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992: 16) define social fields as demarcated social spaces containing interconnected sets of rules, values and protocols that shape individuals’ access to resources.
Within complex and hierarchical organizational structures such as public service organizations, those in the top formal positions, widely viewed as leaders, occupy a distinctive field locus and exert greatest levels of influence within their field. Moreover, fields are not static. They are continually negotiated by disparate, competing social groups, and can themselves be radically restructured, as with the field of public service partnerships (McNulty, 2004) that were institutionalized in the UK public sector. Social fields have both formal and symbolic distinctions, the latter constituted by the relative symbolic resources actors have in order to broker influence and establish domination. They also contain multiple field rules that actors must decode and work within and that help establish implicit boundaries between disparate organizational units. For example, in Kerr and Robinson’s (2011) study of elite bankers, the shift from traditional, paternalistic field rules towards corporate, shareholder-driven ones altered the rules of professional engagement and the legitimation for different forms of action. The banking leaders in this post-bureaucratic field operated within a different range of action frames than in their previously bureaucratic field, including less formalized, procedural and low-risk behaviours – sometimes with destabilizing consequences.
The extent to which field positions are established is contingent on individuals’ relative capability to access valued, or valorized, institutional goods. In work organizations, individuals seek to attain material, cultural or symbolic rewards and find appropriate strategies for negotiating access to appropriate field positions, including role-recognition and status (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983). In organizational and inter-organizational contexts, social fields consist of formally and informally constructed boundaries and distinctions between different actors. This differentiation is manifested through divisions in organizational position, role, membership, status and levels of influence. Social fields such as professional public services interact with political and economic fields, and are subject to variable levels of influence. Thus, the extent to which political and economic fields influence a specific organization has consequences for the field rules and the normative values and modes of categorization and practice within this context.
A feature linked closely to the maintenance of field positions is that of capitals: resources actors use to access position in the occupational field. As Emirbayer and Johnson (2008) discuss, the volume and structure of capitals that an individual has access to is
what determines the structure of positions in an organization-as-field, that is, the more or less durable outcomes of struggles over the conservation or devalorization of what counts (at any given moment) as the legitimate form(s) of capital obtaining therein – and [which] thereby … [affects the] struggles over which actors are to exercise the most influence in organizational decision-making. (pp. 24–25)
Thus, capitals are forms of accumulated economic, cultural or social assets or access to resources that shape individuals’ capacity to move within the field in which they are positioned (Bourdieu, 1986: 241). In effect, they bestow individuals with social and cultural goods that are exchanged, displayed, utilized or transferred in the social setting within which they are seeking to progress.
The possession of varying degrees of capital will determine individuals’ access to economic and cultural goods that are valorized within a specific field (e.g. attaining a key occupational position). Senior managers in professionalized organizations therefore seek to build up their stock of capitals in order to augment their positional power and establish legitimacy for the right to lead. As Ozbiglin and Tatli (2005) propose, ‘at the level of organization, organizational narratives of meritocracy, scientific management and management scholarship in general have traditionally served to reinforce the value of various forms of individual capital’ (p. 862).
For organizational members to advance their positional status and standing within fields, it becomes imperative that they accumulate stocks of cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1986: 243). This may take the form of accumulated bodies of organized knowledge, behaviour and abilities, which might be denoted through formal qualifications that symbolize institutionally recognized forms of competence and value. Managerial forms of credentials, acquired through relatively exclusive forms of training, may provide recognition and endorsement by conferring significant symbolic capital onto the holder. Furthermore, as positional goods, they help maintain favourable field positioning largely through augmenting their perceived organizational value. However, these capitals may need continually to evolve in shifting organizational contexts where there are shifting field dynamics.
Similarly, social capital comprises the actual or potential social resources acquired through wider sets of social relations, obligations, recognition and networks (Bourdieu, 1986: 247–249). Such linkages extend access to knowledge, information structures and other social resources. This socially mediated knowledge enables individuals to operate more fluidly within their social field, as the means by which they are inscribed within the social relations comprising the ‘actors and rules of the game’. The enrichment of social relations and networks therefore may facilitate added knowledge and information about career development and opportunities, as well as ways of opening up various field opportunities (e.g. senior managers may enrich their social capital through developing often reciprocal inter-organizational links with members of other organizational and policy elites).
The concept of capital links closely to that of habitus, employed by Bourdieu (1984: 466–470) in referring to the embodied dispositions, ways of thinking and perceiving that frame the scope of individuals’ actions. The significance of habitus for organizational life lies in the kinds of practices (and practice orientations) that organizational actors engage in, as well the way they are shaped by deeply engrained beliefs and values about appropriate modes of action. For those in formal management and leadership, the development of appropriate dispositions and action frames is significant to their achievement of legitimacy and capacity to exercise appropriate levels of power. It is especially important in a multi-stakeholder context, such as the UK public services, which have become increasingly colonized by the elite policy field, and are also inhabited by disparate professional groups engaged in an ongoing field struggle (Ferlie et al., 2005).
In reconfigured public service fields, new forms of habitus may emerge for coping with increasing complexity and accountability – what Lingard and Christie (2003: 328) have referred to as productive leadership habitus. Significant here is the enhancement of leaders’ dispositions towards dealing with multiple stakeholders and garnering influence across organizational levels. The possession of particular types of habitus may facilitate the execution of symbolic violence in organizations through everyday, interactional and interpersonal mediums – often through behaviours indicating a leader’s naturalness as a leader. Formal leadership development provision may provide some scope for the cultivation of forms of habitus commensurate for leading organizations by helping build up appropriate behavioural repertoires and interpersonal competences. Thus, while not all leaders may possess what Bourdieu terms habitus sans pratique (a habitus that is perfectly honed to the field in which it is manifested), various forms of formal leadership development may at least provide leaders with a ‘feel for the game’ and an enabling framework for acting and perceiving.
A further component in the power dynamic within organizational fields is the capacity for dominant groups or individual actors to perform acts of symbolic violence on others (and themselves): imposing meanings and legitimating them by concealing the power differences that are the basis of their force (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1990: 4). Symbolic violence is therefore a means of establishing domination through categorization and normative influence and control over the cognitive structuring of perceptions. In organizational settings, the exercising of symbolic violence can potentially help mobilize organizational initiatives as well as maintain and legitimate power relations. Crucial to this is the naturalization of power and the enduring capacity for leaders to exercise arbitrary modes of authority onto others, largely in response to their beliefs and expectations. Thus, a politically top–down managerial intervention such as leadership development may help reproduce the interests of those who lead by appealing to the interests (and related value sets) of those who are led. This operates through almost tacit forms of misrecognition among the victims of symbolic violence – in this case, leaders and other professionals who are its recipients. In Bourdieu’s and Passeron’s conceptualizing, misrecognition through acts of symbolic violence represents a process whereby power relations are perceived not for what they objectively are but in a form which renders them legitimate in the eyes of the beholder (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1990: 4), which operates not only through the process of categorization but also through affecting the cognitive structure of those affected – that is, forming or altering the relationships of their perceptions (Calhoun, 2000). In this way, misrecognition ultimately helps mobilize the endeavours of dominant groups via the complicity of those who are subjected to the acts of symbolic violence. This, in turn, effectively occludes the inherent power dynamics at play and helps reproduce the goals and intentions of a dominant coalition.
Kamoche and Pinnington (2012) outline ways in which symbolic violence can be perpetrated within management settings, using the initiative of ‘spiritual management’ as an illustrative case. Significant here is the achievement of consent through the active and positive inculcation of employees to over-arching normative and value frameworks associated with new categorizations of thought and experience. This process works more favourably than direct compliance and coercion, as it appeals to individuals’ agentic propensities and desires to act in ways of their own choosing. In their case, spiritual management, similar to the categorization of leadership, is used to promote new forms of emotional and ‘spiritual’ well-being that appeals to employees’ sense of organizational health and integration. However, it also subtly operates as a form of misrecognition. It serves to reproduce senior managers’ endeavours to instil elements of normative control that tacitly achieve other organizational goals like team-working, work ethic and enhanced productivity. These authors also highlight the pedagogic modes of symbolic violence for changing what is at stake, mainly through forms of professional training that establish consent and widespread buy-in. Initiatives such as management learning may effectively conceal power relations if the positive inculcation of managers is achieved by virtue of seemingly empowering pedagogic tools.
In similar vein, Robinson and Kerr (2009) illustrate the affective dimensions of symbolic violence through the discursive and rhetorical strategies employed by leaders in establishing a ‘culture of togetherness’ and emotional attachment to leadership initiatives. The ‘vision’ often inherent in the charismatic authority of those in elite leadership roles is used to help mobilize change agendas and responsiveness among other organizational members. However, it is also predicated on the wider cultural acceptance of the leader for the greater good of a corporation and its members: subaltern organizational members may be happy to be subjected to symbolic violence if they both trust and accept the motives and the legitimacy of the leader(s) inflicting it.
Developing public service leaders in England
The reshaping of public services through reform has reconfigured the institutional forms and relations within the public service field, and therefore, the role of senior managers. In the UK public services, those occupying formal leadership roles in service organizations and government agencies (such as most NLDBs) have become increasingly conceived by central elites within the policy field as ‘change agents’ whose transformative capacity will enable them to bring about significant service enhancement (Ferlie et al., 2011; O’Reilly and Reed, 2010). Since the introduction of New Public Management mechanisms in the 1980s, the roles of senior managers have become more multifarious, entailing higher levels of accountability, in contexts undergoing repeated change (Pollitt, 2007). Formal leaders have been depicted as integral to the changing field dynamic within new responsive public management in the United Kingdom (Newman, 2005). Increasingly, public service leaders must not only garner influence and establish positional authority but also proactively work with and mediate the changing reform agenda set by central policy elites (e.g. as suggested in Moore’s (1995) notion of public value leadership).
Formal leadership development via NLDBs has become increasingly central to this political project. It offers a means of re-professionalizing senior staff to enhance their capability for reforming their services. More significantly, it is also a means of supplying leaders with the resources, or capitals, for accessing and taking on elite organizational positions, while also enabling them to exercise appropriate acts of symbolic violence within their own organizations. Leadership development operates across different fields (policy and organizational), both of which are heavily conjoined. As a strategic lever conceived by policy elites, formal leadership development may be designed to mobilize the kinds of symbolic violence required in elite professional domains. As such, central policy elites have scope to perform symbolic violence on local-level elites (formal public service leaders) through the normative expectation that the latter will implement reform measures introduced by the former. This is based largely on a degree of collusion between central and organizational leaders in the promotion and take-up of leadership provision, and predicated on the shared understanding that it will advantage public service leaders and their organizations. Furthermore, service-level leaders’ relative sense of agency remains intact. Indeed, evidence suggests that local leaders perceive themselves to have modest scope to mediate the wider reform agenda and appropriate it to their own context, as well as policymakers’ attempts at acculturating them as reform implementers (Wallace et al., 2011).
We draw upon these conceptual resources in developing a critical illustration of policy leaders’ and public service leaders’ perceptions of formal leadership development, their motives for undertaking it and its perceived impacts on their formal leadership positions. The research project examined public service leaders’ self-perceptions as ‘change agents’ and the role of formal leadership development in their acculturation. The data are re-analysed inductively here to illustrate how developing leaders may constitute a form of symbolic violence, reflecting power dynamics across administrative levels, and capitals formation.
Studying the persuasive politics of leadership development
The research was undertaken in four English public service sectors, two within education (secondary schools and universities) and two within health (hospitals and Primary Care Trusts (PCTs)). PCTs were novel organizations created in 2001 as part of government-driven reform with the function of coordinating and purchasing local health-care services (Talbot-Smith et al., 2006; PCTs are now being dissolved.). At the time of the study (2006–2009), the NLDB serving secondary schools was the National College for School Leadership (NCSL), and that for both health-care sectors was the National Health Service Institute for Innovation and Improvement (NHSIII). Both were established by the central government, and their provision was strongly influenced by the relevant government department. Our fourth sector, higher education (HE), was selected for study as it is only partly public funded. The NLDB concerned, the Leadership Foundation for Higher Education (LFHE), originated within the sector.
The data to be discussed come from 121 confidential semi-structured interviews with an opportunity sample of senior politicians and central government civil servants, senior staff in the three NLDBs referred to above and senior staff in secondary schools, PCTs, hospitals and HE institutions (three pre- and three post-1992 universities) during 2007–2009 (Table 1). The formal ‘top’ leaders of organizations from each sector in three English regions were invited to participate, and to nominate up to four senior staff colleagues (e.g. senior leadership teams in schools, executive directors in health trusts). Interviews covered informants’ self-perceptions as leaders and change agents, any experience of external leadership development and its impact, and role in relation to government policy and independent change agendas. We built up a rounded picture of public service leaders’ attitudes towards formal leadership development, its potential impacts on their beliefs, thinking and practices as leaders and its perceived significance in the context of their changing roles. We also explored our respondents’ perceptions of the wider rationale and remit of formal state-sponsored leadership development, including policymakers’ attempts to formally develop them as leaders.
Profile of interviews with senior public service informants.
NLDB: national leadership development bodies; NCSL: National College for School Leadership; NHSIII: National Health Service Institute for Innovation and Improvement; LFHE: Leadership Foundation for Higher Education; HE: higher education.
Informants’ responses were coded according to pre-specified and emergent categories (Glaser, 2001) connected with the experiences and perceptions of NLDB leadership development provision and its effects. The data were interpreted according to the phenomena of legitimation, collective and individual strategies, capitals and symbolic violence through categorization. This enabled us to produce qualitatively rich analyses contrasting different sectors, and to link and analyse informant data. Our priority lay with the – possibly idealized – perceptions and discourses of informants’ descriptions of themselves, the development of leadership and NLDB leadership development provision, while also probing informants’ accounts by seeking examples or opinions that backed or informed their claims. We have focussed here on the experiences of leadership development provision among senior policymakers, senior NLDB personnel and senior organizational staff.
The making (and self-making) of public service leaders: the role of central elites
Interviews with policymakers and NLDB representatives featured extensive discussion of the need to enhance organizational leadership, and service organizations more generally. In this regard, developing ‘capacity’ was often used as a shorthand for the numbers of suitably qualified individuals (i.e. numbers of those with credentialized cultural capital), and developing ‘capability’ for the individual and collective skill sets (or embodied and objectified cultural capital) that were considered necessary for the new world of reformed public services. A senior central civil servant confirmed the prevalence of a ‘general view within government that the skills that were required to deliver a very complex reform agenda, and even more importantly to deliver modern, more accessible, more amenable, more flexible services to the public, needed enhancing’. Likewise, an informant within the Department of Health represented the NHSIII as one of several reform ‘levers’: ‘You’ve got big drivers of performance, of which leadership development and enhancing good practice is … a small but important part’. Even civil servants in HE, who were not involved in setting up the LFHE, thought that leadership development was a key feature of the HE landscape, and that ‘if we hadn’t got it [the LFHE] we’d have to invent it’. It is important to stress that none of these informants depicted the NLDBs as directly passing on the government’s reform agenda to organizational leaders, but they clearly portrayed it as amplifying leaders’ resources.
Senior NLDB informants described their activities as invitational and constructive for leaders and organizations, helping them adjust to policy changes: … my job is to deliver the policy initiatives of the government through leadership development, and my job is also to try to make sure that I do that in a way that meets the needs of school leaders … all the time what you’re trying to do, is to bring together the policy initiatives with the needs of school leaders … we don’t operate in a vacuum here, we operate in a political context. (Senior NCSL informant) We’ve been involved in working with [senior contact in DoH] and a very large group of PCTs … to codify the … organizational competency framework … for the PCTs of the future [an organizational diagnosis which was imposed by the DoH], and we’re now just beginning … to define … the range of different development activities that need to take place. We’ve already developed tools for PCTs to take the outputs of … a self-assessment of their performance and translate those into a development programme for their organization. (emphasis added, Senior NHSIII informant)
The categorical work and the positional effects at play here bear articulation. Most NLDBs were set up by the government. As such, they constituted an act of symbolic violence on the public services in themselves. To set up or encourage the establishment of leadership development bodies implies that leadership in the sectors required developing. Although the NLDBs were established and, to a large extent, funded by and accountable to the government (the LFHE being the exception to this field position), they were largely construed as aiding and developmental to their sectors. They were, to some extent, obliged to construct themselves as market oriented, as they were partly dependent on the custom of service organizations. While the government’s programme of reform was explicit in its imposition of governance mechanisms, performance regimes and in its use of formal categorizations (forms of ‘hard’ control), the NLDBs were instrumental in making these categorizations amenable to service organizations, in translating them (see above) into the organizational milieu of service organizations, thus exhibiting ‘soft’ control (Costea et al., 2008). NLDBs served to soften (as well as legitimate and mask) the symbolic violence of the central government by stressing the self-led responses of service organizations and their leaders.
Organizational leaders’ perceptions and experiences of leadership development
The senior service organization staff interviewed almost unanimously perceived themselves as leaders, whether they had experienced formal leadership development from NLDBs or elsewhere. Two-thirds had accessed or sought some form of NLDB provision. One of the commonest motivations for uptake of provision related to the enhancement of performance and professional responsiveness, within what were perceived to be changing public service field dynamics. Continued professional learning and the enrichment of both organizational and policy-related knowledge were seen as helping negotiate the multiple challenges within the new public service field and its increasing demands on formal leaders. The perceived need for re-professionalization or achieving new forms of ‘leadership professionality’ (Hoyle, 1974) was strongly linked to their self-identification as leaders, their potential role as change agents and the need for enriching their leadership capacity, formally or otherwise. Related to this was a conscious desire to be socialized into new and potentially enabling modes of practice, not only as a way of augmenting their field positions but also aligning their practices towards service enhancement: … to make sure that when I came back to school my practical delivery was correct. In a way it was just to kind of confirm that my understanding of whatever it was, whether it was the learning agenda or whether it was managing – being a managing mentor … I was walking away from there as a learner really. (Assistant Head Teacher, F, Secondary School)
This is a good example of a self-perceived service organization leader simultaneously accepting the dominant categorizations of ‘practical delivery’, strategically accommodating to management and policy trends in the wider educational field (whether for utilitarian or ethical purposes), and gaining embodied cultural capital in the form of a subservient disposition. In this manner, leadership development for continued professional development and re-professionalization had been accepted as a form of symbolic violence to which leaders must be subject. It is also evidence of the acceptance and active internalization of new categorical work, particularly as propagated by central leaders, around the need for enhanced service responsiveness and alignment. All the leaders in this study were simultaneously of the view that their leader work was central to their organization’s outcomes, while also needing to build their capacity for change.
Most senior service organization staff had been actively encouraged to participate in formal leadership development by peers and other official policy elites, and saw it as ‘politic’ to accede to these recommendations. While many informants viewed their participation, selection and encouragement towards leadership development positively, it nonetheless indicates the categorizations entailed in identifying potential participants in leadership development provision. Its prominence in the interviews suggests that it is a widespread, if subtle, means of influencing subordinates. Yet, few informants perceived formal leadership development as something that they were subjected to. Moreover, they did not perceive it as simply ‘bringing them on board’ in reproducing the wider reform agenda. Respondents perceived the motives of the central elites as fairly benign and supportive, and not necessarily designed to mould them into faithful reform implementers. As one PCT Chief Executive reflected,
Thankfully it was rather more sophisticated than that. So, it was, you know, it was putting government policy in context, but I mean one of the strands identified for, you know, of the seven, was around ethical leadership and about having an understanding of where your personal lines are that you wouldn’t cross and how do you handle that when that’s in conflict with others’ expectations.
The overall cultural acceptance of leadership development was largely predicated on it serving their own and their organizations’ interests, through enhancing their capacity. Furthermore, the informants reported not only motivations and mechanisms for the uptake of leadership provision but also significant impacts of this provision on them, as outlined in Table 2.
Numbers of informants that reported one or more impact of NLDB provision.
NLDB: national leadership development bodies; HE: higher education.
Rows are not exclusive.
The question and answers in relation to change agency were more general than the other two topics, and thus, the responses included some reference to non-NLDB leadership development provision. We have approximated the number of respondents with an impact from NLDB provision on their change agency by reducing by a third the number of informants who mentioned such an impact.
Table 2 outlines the variety of different impacts, the most salient being on generic aspects of their leadership, change agency and overall career trajectories. Each of these reported impacts were strongly associated with different forms of capital, particularly in relation to leaders’ own perception of extending the scope of influence and augmenting more advantageous field positioning.
In this regard, the theme of re-professionalization and re-categorisation within the changing public service field related closely to informants’ reported impacts on their cultural capital – the embodied dispositions that were increasingly central for leadership roles. At one level, it encompassed highly symbolic forms, through participation in elite training and the acquisition of relatively elite credentials. At another level, elite leadership development was perceived as a way of impacting and improving embodied ways of thinking and behaving commensurate with their leadership role, in particular their role as change agents. Thus, the cultural and symbolic capital derived from formal leadership development was largely perceived as conferring quite exclusive (and exclusionary) forms of contextual, interpersonal, technical and cognitive knowledge and expertise that legitimate leaders’ authority- and project-appropriate ‘signals’ about their overall leadership value. Many informants explicitly referred to its symbolic importance and prestige. One hospital director gave the reason for participating in a particular programme (offered by the central government Cabinet Office) in terms of it being a ‘prestige event, prestige programme – so only two or three from the National Health Service (NHS) get on to it every intake’. Senior secondary school staff were particularly conscious of the career-significance of acquiring formal leadership development qualifications, which implicitly provided immediate hard currency and objectified capital to give them access to formal leadership positions. These qualifications also translated into economic capital (pay and promotion) since the NCSL certification of the National Professional Qualification for Headship (NPQH) is a mandatory qualification for a first headship, whereas, in the NHS, senior staff were not required to gain a particular leadership credential such as the NPQH, although there was also a requirement for new chief executives to go on a particular leadership development course. In HE, LFHE provision is neither mandatory nor formally recognized by universities. Yet the LFHE ‘Top Management Programme’ was reported as having virtually achieved a normative mandatory significance for aspiring vice-chancellors.
Several informants perceived themselves to have already acquired enough cultural capital through their service-level experience and achievements, which had become recognized and valorized by policy elites. The acquisition of further capitals through formal leadership provision was therefore perceived as something that might add minimal value to their organizational standing, and which they could resist. Strains of resistance or related cynicism were most evident among experienced senior leaders who had already built up extensive forms of capital and who perceived formal development as arbitrary. Such resistance was less evident among more junior leaders who had less organizational standing and mediatory scope.
For most newly appointed to top formal position and aspirants, the formal credentials acquired from formal leadership development and its relative symbolic value were perceived to enrich their organizational standing and access to organization resources. Strong allusions were made to the establishment of forms of cultural distinction, as evidenced by one female assistant head teacher: I think I totally, completely selfishly, thought this is going to be my way to make it, well, at least stand me out if I want to get a deputy headship somewhere else, or a headship, you know, anywhere else, I need it [formal leadership qualification] and … it most definitely was a career development for me.
Informants also referred to the enrichment of embodied forms of capital through formal leadership development. This view closely relates to a common concern to cultivate the appropriate ‘personality package’, as embodied in various traits and dispositions and which would potentially expand their organizational influence (including performing acts of symbolic violence). Leadership development was largely perceived as enriching this capacity through its promotion of ‘softer’, people-centred skills crucial for effective interpersonal and cultural management. Many informants who had actively sought formal leadership development were keen to use it to hone aspects of the leadership ‘personality’ and ‘style’ in order to achieve better organizational outcomes: When I look at NPQH, [compared to] the old model, NPQH is very much about personal development of the individual, your understanding of leadership styles … the development should give them [leaders] a robustness, shouldn’t it, to be able to cope with those demands. (Head, F, Secondary School) I think far more it’s … if you wish to become this [a leader], if you wish to influence people, one of the things you have to have some knowledge of, is how your behaviour … in the broadest sense, influences and changes other people around us. (Medical Director, M, Hospital)
The mode of impacting on their leadership style often entailed normative symbolic violence, for example,
on the Top Management Programme we did 360 degree appraisals, and that was really very good, and I think I did learn things from that, specific things … there were some things that I … I mean it was quite a positive experience, but there were some things I didn’t realise I had to address that I wasn’t aware about myself, I did, and I have done. (Deputy Vice Chancellor, HE Institution)
Perhaps related to such instances of experiencing symbolic violence as positive, a minority of informants alluded to an impact on their confidence and on their networking, and sometimes, these impacts were explicitly linked. The impact on ‘confidence’ is associated with both embodied cultural capital and symbolic capital that senior staff perceived as paramount to establishing organizational influence – indicating incremental adaptations of leaders’ habitus. While there was some variability over how far informants perceived leadership development to hone the self, a significant proportion nonetheless saw their development as leaders to involve a focus on their personality or leadership ‘style’. Thus, senior service organization staff looked to formal development of leadership to help them build for themselves some core aspects of their leadership dispositions, or their leadership habitus, and associated ways of thinking and acting as leaders.
Informants were also aware of how forms of social capital were acquired through formal leadership development, particularly in building up ‘leader networks’ and other kinds of inter-organizational relationships. They saw its potential for broadening knowledge of, and contact within, their organizational sphere. The motivation for network building can be interpreted as linked to building social capital in terms of personal, role and career support. The theme of expanding leadership networks and enriching leader-related knowledge through shared experience was recurrent among the informants who placed strong value on formal leadership development. Learning from others and sharing and exchanging knowledge of practice were regarded as means of enhancing their own practice. They often displayed awareness that formal provision positively affirmed their membership of an elite circuit of leaders charged with similar responsibilities and facing similar challenges. The sense of being part of a leadership network facing similar role challenges and responsibilities reinforced their sense of occupying a central organizational role, providing valuable additional knowledge on leading their organizations. Several senior health organization staff gave importance to the role of leadership development in facilitating access to elite leadership networks. As one hospital director puts it, ‘I thought there would be advantage in getting to know a network of other new chief executives’.
These themes, drawn interpretively from informants’ views on the development of leadership, indicate the breadth and range of types and sources of cultural, symbolic and social capital that they considered important. The perception was widespread that additional forms of capital must be acquired in order to operate effectively in a changing public service arena and that individuals are active agents in acquiring it. Over half of the informants indicated that leadership development provision was only one composite of their leadership formation. However, it was nevertheless seen as a potential form of capital and habitus-building necessary for leading in contemporary public service organizations. Informant-reported active engagement suggests that the cultural and social capital associated with centrally initiated leadership development have the capacity to confer onto those construed to be leaders, the exclusive (and exclusionary) forms of contextual, interpersonal, technical and cognitive knowledge and expertise that legitimate their authority- and project-appropriate ‘signals’ about their overall leadership value.
Developing change agents: capitalizing on a confluence of interests in symbolic violence
The account suggests that centrally initiated leadership development operates as a mode of symbolic violence, legitimating forms of domination and emancipation within multilayered organizational fields. This symbolic violence serves a confluence of interests, allowing a centrally coordinated control technology to become misrecognized among organizational leaders as a supportive platform for their own agentic scope as ‘change agents’ and reformers. Thus, while organizational-level leaders may misrecognize their inculcation to forms of reform-orientated acculturation, they willingly subject themselves to these forms as it strengthens their field positioning as formal leaders. Our findings also show the reproduction and conferment of increasingly valued forms of capital that are perceived to enhance leaders’ positional stronghold in fast-changing post-bureaucratic public service fields.
Our findings further point to a series of relational dynamics. At the central level, leadership development was imposed as a part of broader organizational changes and controls, while positioning this leadership development as invitational and facilitative in translating central directives into responsive autonomous local strategies. At the organizational level, various mechanisms were highlighted. Selection for centrally initiated leadership development served as a form of symbolic violence through categorization and normative pressure. The incentivizing of centrally initiated leadership development through credentials; the disseminating of insider knowledge, dispositions and techniques; the conferral of status and prestige; the modelling and embodiment of leadership; the distilling of confidence and the facilitating of social networks were all forms of bolstering individual leaders’ various forms of capital – objectified cultural capital, embodied cultural capital and social capital, each potentially convertible into another.
The acquisition of capitals by senior staff, as organizational leaders, reflected a confluence of interests between their concern with self-advancement and expanded positional power and the central elite interest in this advancement as a means of achieving their political goals. The impact of centrally initiated leadership development, however, was also related to, and mediated by, the presence of other forms of capital at the organizational level. The result was to combine high levels of consent and self-regulation with forms of resistance to, and appropriation of, these forms of capital. The willingness of leaders to be subjected to symbolic violence was therefore partly contingent on their pre-existing habitus, levels of capital and field position.
Within our illustrative context of UK public services, centrally initiated leadership development can be conceived of as a mechanism for the inculcation and development of the social, symbolic and cultural capital linked to the emergent institutional and cultural logic of ‘leaderism’ within the UK public services (O’Reilly and Reed, 2010). As an evolutionary variant of managerialism, leaderism envisages the valorizing and strengthened positioning of a new institutional actor – the leader. The emergence of leaderism is located within the context of multiple accountabilities for organizational elites: horizontal, vertical and market-based (i.e. government, organizational partners, customers, citizens and co-producers). Furthermore, the development of leaderism is associated with the re-professionalization of managers, positioned front-line professionals, professional–managerial hybrids and even public and stakeholder representatives as leaders (Martin and Learmonth, 2012). This shift may invariably necessitate new forms of elite development and acculturation that help attune new leaders to the ongoing challenges of multiple and complex programmatic reform.
Future research could fruitfully examine how locally initiated leadership development compares in developing leader capitals and the reproduction of consent with centrally initiated leadership development, or, following Vaara and Fay (2011), explore how institutional forms of self-regulation of leadership development conform to or interact with forms of symbolic domination.
Symbolic violence through flexible, customized and affirmative forms of leadership development effectively allows central leaders to generate ‘action from a distance, but without physical presence’ (Bourdieu, 1998: 102). The embodied acculturation of senior staff in organizations as leaders is in the interest of central-level leaders as they rely on the agency and capacity of local-level organizational leaders to bring about changes that are in the wider interests of their service sectors. Moreover, this form of symbolic violence works through predominately cultural means, based on achieving consensus among leaders and by reinforcing their cultural values and beliefs about their role as leaders. More significantly, it serves to enhance their institutional positions within a shifting field by supplying them with additional capitals and potentially building up their dispositional capacities. One of the underlying perceptions among our respondents was the changing dynamics of the post-bureaucratic field and the need for new forms of capital, valorization and dispositional resources to cope with its changing demands. Leaders’ recognition and consecration within the post-bureaucratic field, where the rules of career progression have changed, are affirmed by the experience of new forms of leadership training and acquisition of symbolic capital that are the preserve of an elite organizational cadre. The Bourdieusian theoretical orientation has illustrated the workings of this interplay through a particular mode of symbolic violence that is achieved through the overall cultural acceptance, and valorization, of leadership development as a means of building leaders’ capacity and strengthening their field positioning.
As a device that appeals to leaders’ perceived need for ongoing development, as well as their desire to strengthen their field positions, legitimacy and capacity for action (including dominant forms of symbolic violence), leadership development is affirmed for being in their own organizational interests. When perceived as offering them tools to operate and expand their organizational influence, agency and action frames, formal leadership development acquires a value and cultural acceptance that complements, rather than subverts, leaders’ pre-existing values and interests. This appears to work more effectively than through hard forms of mandatory control aimed at inducing behavioural compliance towards achieving specific goals. As a soft policy lever, leadership development runs little risk of alienating organizational leaders or of sowing seeds for possible subversion, particularly when there is perceived to be little conflict of interest between those in the elite policy field and those in organizational fields. In the public service context explored here, such leaders might be construed as so-called or potential ‘piggies in the middle’ between actors within their own organization (professionalized staff and other managers) who they hope to influence and mould, and other policy elites who look to harness their activities towards desired reform aspirations. Leaders’ willingness to collude with the goals of centrally initiated leadership development appears to reflect an accepted need to engage in processes of symbolic violence that, in turn, leads to the kinds of emancipation necessary to lead in changing professionalized organizational fields.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The views expressed in the article are those of the authors, and do not represent the views of the ESRC. We are indebted to our informants for enabling us to explore their perspectives in some depth.
Funding
The research was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council under grant number RES-000-23-1136.