The ironies of leadership: insights from a narrative analysis of the TV Western drama series,Rawhide

Rawhide

Rawhide was set in post Civil War America, the era of the ‘Wild West’. Between 1867 and 1871, in order to meet the demand for beef in the Eastern states of America, Confederate veterans rounded up the cattle in the West driving the herds north to railheads from where they were transported to Chicago (Greenland, 2010). In Rawhide trail boss Gil Favor (played by Eric Fleming) and his crew must drive 3000 head of cattle 1000 miles along the ‘Sedalia trail’ from San Antonio, Texas, to the rail head at Sedalia, Missouri. Along the way they have adventures or ‘incidents’ as the programme has it. ¹ Although Rawhide is ostensibly ‘period drama’ it is also of its period (the Cold War era of the late 1950s and early 1960s), drawing on the mythical, though not unproblematic, aura of the cowboy hero who embodies ‘a specific, glorious vision of the western liberal ideology’ (Kaulingfreks et al., 2009: 153). Leadership is a central theme and this is set out explicitly at the start of each episode when Gil Favor sits astride his horse, surveys the scene and delivers his homily underlining the meaning to be attached to the ‘incident’ which forms the narrative core for the episode.

Gil Favor (known always to his crew as Mr Favor, or just ‘Boss’) leads his team of stalwart regulars (including a very young Clint Eastwood as Rowdy Yates, the Ramrod of the outfit) ² and other less committed, often untrustworthy, more or less villainous or just plain ornery hands he is forced to pick up along the way. These latter characters destabilize the unit, providing the disequilibrium necessary for the emergence of narrative (Todorov, 1971). Here I first give a synopsis of an episode that exemplifies the drama and is subjected to closer analysis. I then interrogate the portrayal of Gil Favor as trail boss in the programme, drawing on theories of leadership (emplacement); this is followed by displacement which provides an alternative reading as a means to unsettle notions of ‘leadership’.

Emplacement: Gil Favor as leader

Rawhide is centred on the construction and performance of masculinities. Women as characters occupy marginal positions: they are either ‘ladies’ to be respected, or they are not. Either way they are usually trouble and either way Gil Favor keeps them at arms length, ill-at-ease in their company, but always acting correctly and offering protection. Distance is also evident with his handling of the men too. An exception is Rowdy Yates whom in the current discourse we would say Favor mentors, but who also acts as a confessional and a means by which we, the viewers, can access Favor’s more private thoughts and doubts. The relationship with Pete is usually characterized by mutual respect but it lacks intimacy. Gil Favor does not court popularity or attempt to be ‘one of the boys’, maintaining a stern countenance at all times and never engaging in horseplay. To the extent that the cowboy is a ‘charismatic leader’ who ‘fights for social decency, not for personal gain’ and ‘leads oppressed people towards his social vision’ (Wright, 2001: 118) then Favor fits the bill, but in line with the capitalist fervour evident in America at the height of the Cold War, the spiritual goal of the cattle drive is literally (and ironically) the market.

In discussing multiple masculinities in the workplace Collinson and Hearn (1994: 13) set out five discourses and practices of masculinity each of which constructs power relations in different ways and is associated with different management ‘styles’. These are: authoritarianism, paternalism, entrepreneurialism, informalism and careerism. In Rawhide, Gil Favor’s approach can best be understood as authoritarianism, ‘characterized by an intolerance of dissent, a rejection of dialogue and debate and a preference for coercive power’ (Collinson and Hearn, 1994). This is the leader as commander ⁷ who typically leads from the front, takes ‘hard decisions’ and ‘enforces social order’ (Spicer, 2011: 120). Indeed, Gil Favor spends a lot of his time breaking up minor disputes among the men and reinforcing his role as leader: ‘There’s only going to be one boss in this outfit’, ‘Anytime you’re ready to run this drive you let me know’, etc. But this exists alongside, or shifts between, an evident paternalism, a protective ‘rule of the father’ who is ‘authoritative, benevolent, self-disciplined and wise’ (Collinson and Hearn, 1994: 13). This accords with a view of leadership prevalent at the time and characterized by McMurry (1958) as ‘benevolent autocracy’. Bennis (1959: 275), in critiquing McMurry’s thesis, says this ‘sounds like a nostalgic and romantic image of the old-time entrepreneur—the good father, strong, wise, smart, aggressive; a man utterly independent’—a description which describes Gil Favor consummately. McMurry’s benevolent autocrat, Bennis goes on, presents ‘a virtuous and popularized psychoanalytic justification for rigid autocracy on the putative basis that that is the way people are’. The literature on management and leadership at that time places considerable emphasis on human motivation in relation to work, and hence what strategies are required to manage workers. Thus, McMurry’s rather pessimistic view of human nature is echoed in McGregor’s ‘Theory X, Theory Y’ (McGregor, 2006, originally published 1960). Theory X holds that humans are irresponsible and motivated only by self-interest; while Theory Y takes the opposite view, that humans are creative problem solvers, motivated more by the need for self-actualization than by rewards and punishment. A manager’s actions will depend upon whether he subscribes to human motivation in terms of Theory X or Theory Y. For the most part, it might be concluded, Favor tends towards Theory X. Certainly he has no illusions about his men’s finer instincts (again, Rowdy is an exception, and is usually cast in a romantic, if immature mold, easily taken in by the whiles of woman). Indeed Favor is, on occasion, surprisingly tolerant (given his upright, moral stance on most matters) of the crew going off into the nearest town, frequenting saloons and even engaging in what we would call now ‘antisocial behaviour’, such as shooting the place up (see, for example, series 1, episode 4, Incident of the Widowed Dove). While in many respects Gil Favor does exemplify Gene Autrey’s chivalrous ‘Cowboy Code’ (no date), his character is complex and the ambivalent relation of the cowboy to ‘polite society’ (see Parker, 2011) is a recurrent theme.

Models of management prevalent in the period which saw the show’s first airing ‘represented managers in tough, rational and abstract terms’ (McDowell, 2001: 187) and most studies, with a few notable exceptions (see Roper, 1996), largely ignored or obscured the emotional nature of management and workplace relations. Collinson and Hearn (1994: 6) comment on the ‘embeddedness of masculine values and assumptions in the structure, culture and practices of the organization’. While Rawhide is underpinned by this ‘masculine ethic’ (Kanter, 1977) the relationship between Gil Favor and Rowdy Yates clearly does have an emotional dimension. However, whereas an earlier reading might have viewed this as the portrayal of a father-son relationship, more latterly it emerges as a subtext of desire. Fifty years on the paratext surrounding Rawhide (the ‘secondary signals’ which frame a text, Genette, 1997: 2) has changed and current readings inevitably invite intertextual allusion to gay cowboy literature such as Annie Proulx’s Brokeback mountain (2005, originally published 1997). The metaphor of intertextuality, and opportunities for the production of parody as repetition with critical distance that it affords, points up the socially constructed nature of leadership and highlights the role of discourse in conferring meaning. In this way, Favor’s leadership can be read, with this critical distance, as a seductive performance: his upright posture in the saddle, the sure and confident way he turns his horse, his complex choreography of the cattle drive—even his leather chaps speak authority. ⁸ Favor’s leadership is signalled by his visibility and presence such that ‘what is folded within the manager’s body is the organization “itself” for the mimetic relationship between the organization and the body cannot be missed ’ (Harding, 2003: 125). This embodiment, as part of a relational ‘aesthetics of leadership’ (Hansen et al., 2007: 545), evokes a desire which gives rise to followership—a desire which extends to the viewer too in an aesthetic which in Rawhide is indelibly linked to the romance of the cattle drive, the cowboy and the West as the mythical origins of America.

Displacement: Gil Favor as narrator

Analysis of leadership in Rawhide as ‘emplacement’ depends upon the illusion of the real-time unfolding of events that make up the ‘incident’. Immersion in the fictional world implies a willingness, an obligation even to ‘disattend the puppeteer’ (Jahn, 2001: 676, citing Erving Goffman). At any point in the drama it is presumed by the viewer that the outcome of the events is unknown to the actants themselves. As part of this process the viewer regards the characters as autonomous within the drama to the extent that their words and actions are considered to be spoken by them and ‘really’ theirs, and we understand their relationship to Gil Favor in these terms. Favor’s authority is constructed as stemming from the acceptance of his position by his men and his leadership is thus presented as objectively real within the context of the unfolding drama. But this is not, however, to reduce the viewer to one of Garfinkel’s (1967) cultural dopes. Viewers may be well aware of the discursive (ideological) nature of character constructions (Fiske, 2010: 161) while remaining willing to suspend this higher knowledge and submit to the illusion of the fictional world created and its narrative conventions. This literary realism fosters a traditional image of the leader in terms of responsibility, accountability and authority. The apparently simple goal of getting the cattle to the railhead masks the complexity of the task—the unknown and unknowable lying in wait— giving rise to the ‘incidents’ which provide opportunities for the exercise of leadership. Thus, in Incident of the dog days, Gil Favor’s (usually pretty well infallible) judgement is called into question by the men, a questioning that results in the destabilization of the unit almost to the point of collapse, but in the end we see his superior judgement as leader emerge, enabling him to lead his men and beeves across the dry plains to safety.

If, however, we take a different starting point possibilities for an alternative analysis and interpretation emerge which bear directly on the construction and framing of leadership. At the beginning of each episode Gil Favor delivers the prologue, setting out the moral of the story. Indeed, Gil Favor can be taken as the narrator of the drama as well as a character within it. The narrator is ‘the agent who manages the exposition, who decides what is to be told, how it is to be told (especially, from what point of view, and in what sequence), and what is to be left out’ (Jahn, 2001: 670). This implies that far from unfolding into the unknown, the story is being constructed and told in retrospect by him and hence from his point of view. Such a reading is warranted precisely by the delivery of the prologue as Gil Favor’s telling. This re-positioning of Gil Favor as homodiegetic narrator enables insights from narratology to be deployed in an analysis of the drama thereby generating insights into leadership. It is this move that gives rise to the ironic epiphany as ‘the moment of wonder’ (Nealon, 2005: 127). But, in this case, the ironic reversal is precisely that which disinvests leadership of its wondrous, ‘sacred’ (Grint, 2010b) element, instead we can now see it as the somewhat dubious narrative of an ageing cowboy. In this way Favor’s leadership does not so much, ‘through the provision of safety and security’ ‘silence the anxiety of followers’ (Grint, 2010b: 101) as literally render followers silent. Such a reading immediately arouses questions concerning Gil Favor’s reliability as narrator. ⁹ Whose version of events are we now seeing and how much credence can we place on them? This insight radically undermines the generic conventions which guide the viewer’s assumptions (Beebee, 1994). Thus the frequent repetition of utterances such as ‘Mr Favor’s the boss’ can now be read as how he imagines, or would like, his men to see him: repetition becomes a rhetorical device to convey his position of authority and identity as leader to the narratee (i.e. the person to whom Favor addresses his narrative). Indeed on occasions, ironically, these utterances come out quite stilted as if the men resist this attempt at ventriloquization.

Moreover, in this reading Gil Favor—to whom we can impute agency as narrator—can now (re-)write the narrative so that even his ‘wrong’ judgements can be seen, with the benefit of hindsight, to have been inspired: his ‘misjudgement’ of Johnny Camber/Billy Carter is a case in point. Though he was wrong about the identity of Camber/Carter, yet he was right in the much more significant judgement of the man and his motives. Similarly, the complicating narrative action which sees the unit fall into disarray and which (in Favor’s telling) is interpreted by the men as caused by his poor judgement (‘Maybe it’s Mr Favor, going across the dry plains when he should’ve gone round’) can be seen as a narrative device which serves to point up the failings of his followers since it is actually their questioning of Favor’s decision that is the cause of the trouble. In this way Favor creates, through his narration, the illusion of leadership which has Jed say in the end (not without ambivalence since his motives in supporting Favor’s decision are open to question), ‘You had the right hunch all along. Looks like you’re going to make it’.

Indeed, with respect to Incident of the dog days an alternative narrative could be constructed which emplots these incidents in quite another way producing a different narrative of leadership, i.e. Gil Favor’s judgement is deeply flawed and it is only through the actions of the men, particularly Pete who is driven away but who finds water and out of a sense of loyalty to the crew returns, that disaster is averted. Or we could say that it is entirely through chance and random events that a satisfactory outcome is achieved at all. In this way, leadership, as narrative construction, can be seen to reside in the discourse (the telling) rather than the story (the events): ¹⁰ it is the narrating act that ‘shapes and transforms the story’ (Alber and Fludernik, 2009: 3.2). The narrative version told by Gil Favor becomes, through metonymy, the organizational narrative.

A dramatic resolution…

The reframing of the narrative as Gil Favor’s telling signals a paradox in which Rawhide presents as two ultimately undecidable and mutually incommensurable allegories of leadership. In the first, leadership is situated in the relation between leaders, followers and context which shapes decision-making. In the second, leadership is constructed post-hoc as the meaning given to events/actions. Yet, as Fairhurst (2009: 1615) points out, context is ‘not simply “read” as if it were merely awaiting discovery’ rather, ‘context is predicated on … a clear formulation of what for others might be a chaotic welter of impressions’. This ‘chaotic welter’ can be represented by considering an extract from the synopsis of Incident of the dog days provided on ‘tv.com’: ¹¹

Favor stops Talby from shooting Johnny Camber. He says he’s gunslinger, Billy Carter, who killed his daughter. Old trailboss Jed lost a herd over this land. A detour around would take two to three weeks. Carl Myers says he’s taking cockleburrs out of Rowdy’s bedroll. Jed Blaine says he thinks they can make it across the dry plain. Bates and two others quit. Pete and Rowdy are ready to mix it up. Jed tells Pete Favor wants him. Clark accuses Myers of being a card cheat and a trail camp thief. Talby says Billy ran off with 18 year old daughter and killed her. The watering hole is poisoned. Rowdy and Pete fight … etc.

A paradox arises as a result of the future orientation which locates leadership-as-context in decision-making and a past oriented leadership-as-narration which is predicated on sense making (Weick et al., 2005). Meaning cannot be decided until after the event, yet context drives decision-making. Thus leadership is both always already constructed and always still undecidable, indefinitely deferred in the current moment. The recognition of this paradox undermines essentialist understandings but offers up possibilities for reconceptualizing leadership in an altogether more satisfyingly ambivalent and ambiguous manner. In particular, this reframing starts to address Alvesson and Spicer’s (2011: 200) question: ‘what exactly is it that the language of leadership does not allow us to see. How does it mask important aspects of social reality … ?’. Perhaps what it most urgently seeks to mask is its own undecidability. Instead, essentialist conceptualizations of leadership construct contexts which give rise to particular desired versions of leadership. This is the sleight of hand that paradox points up. Allard-Poesi suggests that what she calls the postmodern route that ‘invites us to engage against our sensemaking process’ (2005: 190, emphasis in original) leads us into a trap which disengages us from ‘the mode of living that we are trying to understand’. But arguably, the inducement to ‘engage against’ is precisely what fosters the recognition, reflexively, of the paradox of ‘leadership’ thereby presenting opportunities for actors (leaders and followers) to ‘shift their expectations for rationality and linearity’ (Smith and Lewis, 2011: 385).This is an insight which goes beyond an appreciation of leadership as a social construct which merely paves the way for the emergence of new essentialisms. Rather, as paradox it resists attempts at closure.

Parody and irony are, Alvesson and Spicer suggest, ‘dissenting tropes’, analytical tools with which to examine social constructs. Hutcheon (1998, quoted in Nünning, 1999: 125) defines parody as ‘repetition with critical distance that allows ironic signalling of difference at the very heart of similarity’. The double reading emplacement/displacement is a repetition which opens leadership up to critique and which gives rise to the ironic epiphany as the disruption of an essentialist ontology of ‘leadership’. But this move also produces the concept of leadership itself as parody: leadership becomes a repetition with difference rendering it a deeply ironic concept. The production of leadership as paradoxical repetition does not, however, lead to impasse rather it constitutes a theoretical tool enabling further analysis. In this way a resolution and synthesis is achieved (while the ground is laid for a new antithesis). And so the cattle drive keeps rollin’…