“Leadership as a social problem”: A conversational engagement with the ideas of Alvin Gouldner

Leadership as a social problem

That statement, rendered in all-capital letters, welcomes readers to sociologist Alvin W. Gouldner’s (1950) book of original and previously published chapters collected under the title Studies in Leadership: Leadership and Democratic Action (Gouldner, 1950: 3). Gouldner’s name rarely, if ever, surfaces in today’s leadership literature. Google Scholar (search conducted on 13 November 2019) lists over 11,000 citations of Studies in Leadership, mainly coming from the fields of sociology and political science. Yet, leadership scholars do not seem to have found their way to the volume. Three recent critical appraisals of leadership discourse (Spector, 2016; Tourish, 2013; Wilson, 2016), as well as Peter Northouse’s standard leadership text (Northouse, 2013), contain not a single reference to Studies in Leadership.

Gouldner’s work is an early manifestation of a critical approach to leadership predating by over half a century the appearance of Leadership, a journal explicitly focused on critical leadership studies. Critical scholars in the 21st-century have argued the problematic nature of leadership as a construct (e.g. Collinson et al., 2018; Grint, 2000; Spector and Wilson, 2018; Tourish, 2013). By combining a keen sense of historical context with a commitment to the social as well as the science aspect of social science, Gouldner asserted his credentials as a critical scholar while examining the problematic nature of leadership as exercised within a democratic society.

In reviewing Gouldner’s robust lifetime of work, a New York Times obituary remembered him as a “maverick” and a “radical activist” (Gouldner, 1981: 16). ¹ Gouldner’s towering achievement, The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology (Gouldner, 1970), as well as his founding and editing of two influential sociological journals, Trans-Action and Theory and Society, provided a strong foundation to his legacy.

No acknowledgement was made in the Times’ obituary of Gouldner’s first publication, Studies in Leadership. Fair enough. It was not his most notable or impactful work. Still, sociologist Robert Merton praised the volume for achieving a high level of “clarity and intelligibility of writing” (Merton, 1982: 920).

Under the Studies in Leadership umbrella, Gouldner brought together an impressive and varied roster of contributors. Theodor Adorno, Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, Paul Lazarsfeld, Kurt Lewin, Seymour Lipset, Robert Merton, Robert Nisbet, David Riesman, Philip Selznick, and William Foote Whyte—this is just a partial list—represent a stunning who’s-who of postwar social scientists. In order to gain just an inkling of how prominent these scholars would become over the next decade, consider this partial list of publications: Adorno’s Authoritarian Personality (1950), Bell’s The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (1960); Glazer’s (with Daniel Moynihan) Beyond The Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City (1963); Lipset’s Political Man (1960); Nisbet’s Sociological Tradition (1966); and Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd (1950). A number of the participants—Lazarsfeld, Lewin, Merton, Selznick, and Whyte, for example—had already established a significant scholarly reputation, and a listing of book titles should be supplemented with a recognition of their contribution to theory and institution-building. ²

These scholars shared a belief that their intellectual acumen could and should be applied to the question of how to ensure sustained democratic leadership in the United States. Gouldner’s commitment—one that helped define his lifetime of work—was proclaimed in the subtitle of the volume: Leadership and Democratic Action. “It occurred to me to reexamine a range of social science concepts and propositions with a view to shifting out those which might prove useful to democratic action groups” (Gouldner, 1950: xiii).

It is more than the prominence of the many contributors that warrants an examination of Studies in Leadership. More, even, than the fact that this is an early and overlooked (within the literature of leadership) volume of critical appraisal. It is the timeliness (and timelessness) of its theme that invites attention.

Intellectual combatant/social critic

“Al was a sociologist,” wrote Lewis Coser in a special memorial issue of Theory and Society. Gouldner “was also a wide-ranging intellectual concerned with almost all the central issues and problems that confront our society and its culture.” He combined “sociological imagination” with “radical” thinking and a “commitment to the role of the intellectual” (Coser, 1982: 886).

After earning an undergraduate degree in business from Baruch College in New York City, Gouldner entered Columbia University where he came under the tutelage of his life-long friend—a difficult relationship, apparently, racked by dramatic ruptures (Chriss, 2000)—and mentor, Robert Merton. ³ While searching for a dissertation topic—he would eventually settle on a study of wildcat strikes (labor actions undertaken without official union sanction)—Gouldner joined the department of sociology and anthropology at the University of Buffalo (Stein, 1982). It was at Buffalo that Gouldner conceived of and executed his leadership project. The volume, he wrote, “was born of a variety of experiences which I have had in democratic action groups” (Gouldner, 1950: xiii). Gouldner had been, and was still at the time of the volume, a member of the Communist Party USA (Chriss, 2000; Miller, 1981). That commitment to Communism was taken by Gouldner and other radical activists of the Popular Front era to be fully compatible with democratic values (Kazin, 2011). ⁴

Gouldner would never again return to leadership as an explicit focus of his writing. His work moved, instead from industrial sociology (Gouldner, 1953, 1954) to an eclectic concern for social theory (e.g. Gouldner, 1965, 1980) and the role of intellectuals—social scientists primarily—in public life (e.g. Gouldner, 1973a,b, 1979, 1985). Through his prodigious publishing career, Gouldner gained the reputation, along with C. Wright Mills, as among “the greatest sociologists of their generation” and “undoubtedly the most influential and controversial” (Chriss, 2000: vii–viii).

Unlike Talcott Parsons’ structural functionalism, Mills’ formulation of a power elite, Erving Goffman’s dramaturgical analysis of self-presentation, or Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s theory of the social construction of knowledge, Gouldner never fully established a unique “brand” of sociological theorizing (Lemert and Piccone, 1982). It was his insistence on a reflexive social theory that helped define his lasting contribution. “By deepening our understanding of our own sociological selves and of our position in the world,” sociologists should be able to better understand and analyze others as they interacted in a social world (Gouldner, 1970: 512). It was, Gouldner insisted, that drive to reflect on one’s personal experience that drove the development of social theory (Aya, 1982), which “is often the search for the meaning of the personally real, that which is already assumed to be known through personal experience” (Gouldner, 1970: 484). That view of a self-aware and activist role for social theorists found full statement in The Coming Crisis, cementing his reputation as “one of the prime sociological theorists of his generation” (Merton, 1982: 916).

“This is a big book: big in size, in conception, and in implication,” read a contemporaneous review of The Coming Crisis (Swanson, 1971: 317). The tome quickly reverberated throughout the world of sociology and adjacent fields of social science. The Coming Crisis was “nothing less than a full-blown sociological analysis of sociological theory from August Conte to the present” (Berger, 1970: 275). It was that “sociological analysis” turned inward to look at “sociological theory” (and, in reality, all of social science) that made this a “timely, important, and brilliant book” (Scholte, 1971: 308). The Coming Crisis provided

“a general and encompassing method for the contextual understanding of any ‘paradigmatic’ change (the critique of social theory) and suggests a sensitive and perceptive approach to the intellectual consequences and critical assessment of sociological crises in praxis and in theory” (Scholte, 1971: 308).

Gouldner focused his critique especially on Talcott Parsons. Structural functionalism, Parsons’ macro-level framework of analysis which dominated postwar sociological discourse, suffered from over-abstraction and a dearth of attention to the dynamics of power differentials (House, 1971: 184; Johnson, 1989: 378). The coming crisis of Gouldner’s title arose, at least in part, from the rejection of Parsons’ paradigm by the newly emerging class of sociological academics who were driven more by a passionate humanism than the dominant formalism of Parsons.

Although there was no debate about the significance of The Coming Crisis, its content was hotly disputed: Gouldner’s assumptions were dubious, his structure confusing, and his tone pompous. “Disappointing, frustrating, repetitious, and at times, pretentious and embarrassingly self-righteous” led off one of the more searing critiques (Bernstein, 1972: 65). Unsurprisingly, given his well-known penchant for intellectual combat (Coser, 1982; Merton, 1982), Gouldner pressured the editors of the American Journal of Sociology to bypass their usual practice and allow a rebuttal. In doing so, Gouldner accused critics (by name, no less) of “pious self-confidence” (Gouldner, 1973a, 1973b: 153).

Still, even his harshest critics conceded that Gouldner “took seriously the work of theorizing and the proper role of the social critic” (Chriss, 1999: ix). “The historical mission of the social theorist,” Gouldner had written in a 1965 volume, “is to assist mankind in taking possession of society” (Gouldner, 1965: 170). Through The Coming Crisis and permeating his larger body of work, Gouldner rejected the posture of “a transcendental cognitive position” assumed by most practicing social sciences (Fuhrman, 1984: 288). He insisted that intellectuals could and should become an instrument for social transformation (Scott and Marshall, 2009), but only if and when they first looked inward, taking into full account the personal, interpersonal, and institutional forces that shaped their inquiries. Reason was always shaped by pre-established values and thought domains.

“As much as anything,” James Chriss wrote, “Gouldner’s legacy to sociology can be understood as a call to sociologists to be wary of the extracognitive factors influencing the types of research agendas we pursue and the allegiances we develop—to other colleagues, to funding agencies, to institutions along the way” (Chriss, 2000: 201). All social science work was political, and Gouldner’s intent was to insist that rational, political discourse was not just possible but the proper posture for social scientists, as long as they made their assumptions explicit (Gouldner, 1976). That view of social scientists as activists in search of democratic ends was on full display in his first publication, a book on leadership.

An act of imagination

This article is a work of intellectual history; an engagement with a set of ideas and the historical context in which those ideas emerged (based on the definition of intellectual history by Higham, 1961). That engagement takes the form of an imagined conversation. Such a conversation—that is, one between the (present) author and (the past) Alvin Gouldner—never took place. Although not a conventional format, this mode of analysis falls well within the bounds of historical inquiry.

Historians always engage in conversations; really, two sets of conversations that unfold simultaneously. The first is a dialogue between the historian and the past. There will also be a second exchange; this between the historian and that historian’s present. Those conversations could have been presented in a more straightforward, traditional analysis of Gouldner’s work, enfolding analysis in its appropriate historical context, and drawing parallels to contemporary leadership concerns. Such a presentation would be scrupulously cited, allowing readers to turn to the appropriate pages in the original to ensure accuracy of quotation.

However, formatting the article as an imagined discussion heightens the act of active engagement, bringing the two typical historian conversations front and center. An interaction with the past—with Gouldner’s thoughts as expressed through his writing—is thus combined with an active engagement with the present. In that sense, the format, demands that Gouldner’s past and the author’s present be considered not as discrete and separate units of analysis but as part of the same and ongoing inquiry into a consideration of leadership in a democratic society.

Whatever the chosen format, historians always do more than simply reflect the past with mirror-like precision (as if such precision were even possible). Historians act on the artifacts of the past, and then construct a version of the past that reveals themes, interactions, and meanings (Durepos and Mills, 2011). Ewick and Silbey (1995: 200) added that, in order to perform that task, the scholar engages in “some form of selective appropriation of past events and characters.” That act of selective appropriation of the past does not reside outside of the norm. It is the norm. In that regard, history is “an exercise in creative imagination” (Munslow, 2006: 99). The historian becomes an agent of imagination (Spector, 2016: 8).

Of course, historians have obligations; constraints within which their acts of imagination must occur. History writing is “obligated to rest upon evidence of the occurrence in real space and time of what it describes and insofar as it must grow out of a critical assessment of the received materials of history, including the analysis and interpretations of other historians” (Mink, 1970: 545). Artifacts of the past cannot be imagined into existence by the historian (White, 1995). There was an actual volume, Studies in Leadership. The conversation that follows refers to the book, the existence of which can be confirmed by independent examination.

At the same time, no artifact “speaks for itself” (Denzin and Lincoln, 1994). Historians will always “read” those received materials in a manner affected by their own constructions. Therefore, no interpretation of those artifacts can be said to be the true, positive interpretation. The goal of the historian, rather, is to offer “a plausible and therefore quite acceptable” understanding of the content contained in those materials without claiming it to be only possible understanding (Munslow, 2006).

Some ground rules

Gouldner’s ideas on leadership and its role in a democratic society come directly from his introductory chapter as well as his short introductions to the various sections of the book. The conversation is presented with a blend of direct quotes, paraphrases, and added transitional comments. To enhance the flow of the conversation and infuse it with a sense of connectivity between interviewer and interviewee, no quotation marks or page numbers have been inserted. Readers have a perfect right to ask: have Gouldner’s ideas been characterized in a plausible way. Because the book itself is real, readers can test the construction of those ideas and render an independent judgment.

Additionally, Gouldner has not been given any direct knowledge of events that occurred after his death. Connections to subsequent events and research developments have been attributed to the interviewer. Again, the issue of plausibility is critical. Does the author articulate plausible connections between Gouldner’s (1950) work and more recent events? Readers can and should refer the received material: Gouldner’s original book.

The state of leadership studies

At the moment of Studies in Leadership’s publication, a psychological paradigm dominated leadership discourse. During the Second World War, psychologists worked with the US military to develop a systematic approach to officer selection. Leon Pennington and Romeyn Hough Psychology of Military Leadership (1943) concluded that a particular constellation of individual traits—decisiveness, force and aggressiveness, tact, energy, and humanity, even appearance, among them—could be used to guide the selection of high potential individuals. A competing theory—situational leadership—suggested that rather than searching for a definitive cluster of leadership traits, scholars needed to understand “the particular situation” in which the leader operated (Jenkins, 1947: 75). Although most closely associated with Hersey and Blanchard (1969), situational leadership found expression in the immediate postwar years and attracted Gouldner’s attention as an inadequate analysis of leadership dynamics.

Gouldner was well aware of and more favorably disposed toward Max Weber’s notions of charismatic authority. “Both rational and traditional authority are specifically forms of everyday routine control of action,” argued Weber, “while the charismatic type is the direct antithesis of this” (Weber, 1947: 361). Weber held that the source of charisma was a gift received from God. Individuals who held such authority would be “obeyed” by virtue of the “personal trust in his revelation, his heroism, or his exemplary qualities” (Weber, 1978: 216). Gouldner recognized Weber’s construction as a useful typology for analyzing the varied roles leaders played in organizations and societies.

A separate branch of leadership studies was being established during this same time period. Starting in 1945, a group of researchers at Ohio State University, working under the direction of Carroll Shartle, initiated a study of effective leadership within an organizational context. Like Pennington and Hough, the Ohio State researchers were psychologists. Rather than focusing on the traits of individual leaders, however, these scholars assessed the behavior of managers and the response to those behaviors on the part of employees. Although the Ohio State studies (as well as the subsequent Michigan State studies conducted under the direction of social psychologist Renis Likert) would exert a great deal of influence over the direction of leadership discourse in the following decades (see Spector, 2016), there is no reference to these behavioral theories either by Gouldner or the contributors to Studies in Leadership.

Let’s turn now to the imagined conversation, opening with a question about what provoked Gouldner’s interest in leadership.

In conversation

Spector: You state in your introduction that Studies in Leadership was a response to widespread interest that existed in the topic in 1950. I was surprised by that. From the vantage point of 2020, interest in leadership seems virtually boundless. I just took the opportunity to look on the Amazon webpage, which lists “over 40,000” titles—that’s how they say it, “over,” as if they can’t count any higher—containing the word leadership. I know, in other words, there is a great deal of current interest in the subject. But, I wasn’t expecting that level of interest in 1950. What do you think was behind that interest?

Gouldner: At the time I put the volume together, the forms, the problems, the techniques, and the goals of leadership were a matter of public interest in our society. Businessmen and trade unionists, professors and Boy Scouts, social workers and generals, were all voicing a desire for more and better leadership in their respective spheres. And this was really nothing new. There has really always been an interest in the topic. The universality of leadership, the fact that it is apparently found at all times and in all places, though tremendously varied in structure and function, suggests long-standing attention.

Spector: At the very opening of your introductory chapter, you position leadership as a “social problem.” So much of today’s leadership discourse, both from the popular press and from the academic literature, sees leadership as a remedy rather than a problem. If only we had better leaders, we’d have a better organization, a better nation, or a better world. (e.g. Goodwin, 2019; Gordon, 2017; Praszkier, 2017).

Gouldner: That was no doubt the same in 1950. Leadership was explicitly articulated by wide social strata as being a remedy to social problems. I was making the point that leadership was as much a social problem as unemployment, housing, or race relations. Social problems are conditions that impair some social entity or disrupt some settled routine. They are conditioned by and formulated in terms of specific values. They always challenge or transgress some important value.

Spector: What value gave rise to the “social problem” of leadership in 1950? What value was being challenged or transgressed?

Gouldner: I was referring to the drive to master and control the world around us. The belief that we can control our external world rather than be controlled by it is largely a Western European phenomenon, having it roots in the rise of the triumvirate of Protestantism, modern science and capitalism. As Max Weber noted in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, the Renaissance oriented us to believe in our capacity to master events. Calvinism enjoined humans to labor and build an earthly monument to the glory of God. Alfred North Whitehead, in Science and the Modern World, saw in science a sense of a previously inconceivable control over our world. And capitalism, with its destruction of the traditional ties to aristocratic leadership and feudal nobility, heighted our sense of individuality and imparted, at least to the middle classes, the sense that they were captains not only of industry but also of their own souls.

Spector: At the time of your book, what challenged that belief?

Gouldner: By 1950, in a multitude of spheres, the expanding phenomenon of alienation challenged and sometimes undermined that value of mastery and control. Often what was being asked for implicitly was leaders who could accomplish what the alienated individual, overcome by a sense of powerlessness, could not.

Spector: So, alienation was the underlying, even the inevitable, social condition, and leadership was the social problem because …

Gouldner: Because of the temptation to turn to leaders, wrote Erich Fromm, as an avenue of “escape from freedom” (Fromm, 1941: 176). Alienated individuals can seek the authoritarian solicitude of what Fromm called the “magic helper”: that impossible individual who presumably can satisfy all our wants and needs. By identifying with that leader, we can vicariously escape our frustrating limitations.

Spector: In your telling, then, the preoccupation with leadership is a phenomenon of the overthrow of aristocratic and inherited power enhanced by the Protestant revolt and the emergence of capitalism.

Gouldner: All of which support the dominance of modern democratic values. And those values, in turn, condition the extensive and articulate concern with leadership that was so prominent in 1950.

Spector: How does that modernist understanding of leadership differ from the feudal conception?

Gouldner: Typically, Western Europeans prefer to believe that leadership behavior may be learned, that one does not have to be “born to the purple” in order to lead. This, in contradiction to the feudal ideology of leadership as the distilled product of generations of rule. As part of their conflict with feudal nobility, the bourgeoisie supported a conception of leadership as learnable behavior, which through thought, discussion, and rational organization, could master the social processes.

Spector: I can’t count the number of book titles available today that promise to reveal the hidden secrets of becoming an effective leader. There is The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership: Follow Them and People Will Follow You (Maxwell, 2007). And then, there’s The Charisma Myth in which the author reduces charismatic leadership to a series of parlor tricks that can be learned by anyone seeking to “master the art and science of personal magnetism” (Cabane, 2012). And, of course, there are endless seminars and workshops—a number of which I’ve participated in myself—that promise a path to leadership skills.

Gouldner: There is some positive to be taken from this. Leadership is viewed as being accessible to all in possession of will and intellect. And keep in mind, this new conception of leadership also had its social functions. Simultaneously, it served as an ideological weapon against the established elite and as a justification for stabilizing the power to which the middle class had newly succeeded.

Spector: The irony, I suppose, is the very democratic ideal of leadership—as something that anyone can learn regardless of birthright—can give way to authoritarianism when those ideals run up against the inevitable alienation of modern society.

Gouldner: That can happen particularly when moderns are thwarted in the belief in their capacity to master the social processes through the inevitable toll of alienation.

Spector: Fromm’s formulation that you alluded to earlier is chilling because he sees not an escape to freedom but an escape from freedom. When the book was published in the UK, in fact, it was titled Fear of Freedom.

Gouldner: During the Great Depression (1929–1941), urgent demands for “capable” leadership were widely heard. And as Robert and Helen Lynd (1937) found in their return to “Middletown,” some of that leadership talk had unmistakably fascist overtones.

Spector: The Lynds wrote about local Muncie, Indiana leaders (under the disguise of “Middletown”) who provided assurances embedded in “symbolic patriotic phrases” intended to appeal to the “pent-up anxieties” of residents (Lynd and Lynd, 1937: 509). They worried about the possibility, under those conditions, that a fascistic–oriented strongman might emerge who could appeal to both the business class and the working class. ⁵ Were you still worried about that possibility in 1950? That was the year that Joseph McCarthy infamously insisted that “I have here in my hand a list of 205” State Department employees who had “been named as members of the Communist Party and members of a spy ring” (Cavendish, 2000: 52). At the same time, the exigencies of the Depression were long past.

Gouldner: It was still not entirely clear in 1950 whether the voices that spoke loudest were those seeking a leadership for peace or whether they were calling, once again, for martial guidance. That was a painful ambiguity.

Spector: And that painful ambiguity remains. Today, both academics and the popular press celebrate the potential for heroic leaders to be what Fromm called the “magic helper.” By trafficking in assertions of individual causation, academic discourse plays a key role in legitimizing heroic ideals and expectations of those in charge to be transformational. In 2016, the country elected a President who insisted that “I alone’ could heal the nation’s alleged wounds and lectured followers that “what you are seeing and what you are reading is not what’s happening. Just stick with us” (Tornoe, 2018). That demagoguery pandered to people’s prejudices and passions by insisting that he was the “one” who had come to save the many. Spector and Wilson (2018: 786) argue that the notion of the individual heroic leader “metastasizes from theoretical ideal” to become “a pervasive, highly problematic social norm.”

Gouldner: I am not surprised. This is an ongoing challenge in democratic societies.

Spector: Now, if I can, I’d like to turn to some of the specific chapters in the book.

Gouldner: Before doing so, I’d like to address one of the primary reasons I put this volume together.

Spector: Please.

Gouldner: I believed it was not sufficient merely to study leadership. Insights should be secured concerning the social conditions that impelled modern social science to define leadership in one way rather than in another; to emphasize certain of its facets but to neglect some; to employ particular concepts, hypotheses, and assumptions while leaving alternative possibilities unexplored. I believe strongly that social scientists who study leadership have a social responsibility to explain their emphasis and their lacunae.

Spector: That theme comes through in this volume and seems to have permeated your entire career. Your admonition concerning the social responsibility of scholars applies to whatever subject social scientists take on. It was written about you that, throughout your career, you “deplored the objective detachment of what he termed ‘establishment’ sociological views, which he regarded as an evasion of moral responsibility and obsequious adherence to the status quo” (Gouldner, 1981: 16).

Gouldner: The social scientists represented in this volume were variously considering the forms, techniques, the social and psychological conditions evoking authoritarian leadership. But, the possible ways of containing authoritarian leadership and supporting democratic values came under consideration as well. This seems as justifiable and vital an undertaking as medical science’s study and efforts to control the pathogenic agents impairing the human organism.

Spector: Are you equating social science with medical science?

Gouldner: Admittedly, social scientists disagree among themselves as to the possibility of a scientific ethic; some believe, while others vigorously deny, that science can determine values or decide what is good and bad. Needless to say, the efforts of social scientists bear nothing like the degree of precision or reliability attained by medical science.

Spector: You insist that social scientists are legitimately entitled to use their methods and knowledge to realize a value. That commitment to democratic values comes across particularly in your section on democratic and authoritarian leaders.

Gouldner: This was the section—the challenge to democratic values and the concern for their defense—in which the practical and ethical core of the volume came into sharpest focus. What are the characteristics of authoritarian and democratic leaders? What are some of the sources and consequences of authoritarian leadership? And how can authoritarians be effectively opposed; not just opposed but opposed in such a way that democratic values are not lost in the process?

Spector: That set of questions reverberates with contemporary concerns. The year 2016 has been seen as the West’s “horrible year,” its “mad-as-hell” moment (Krasteva, 2019; Robinson and Bristow, 2017). The twin elections on Brexit in the UK and the victory of Donald Trump in the US heralded the victory of “unbridled demagoguery” and “xenophobia” combined with the “condemnation of the elite” (Reynié, 2016: 48). It’s a moment in which authoritarian leadership sprung up not in opposition to popular choice, but rather as a reflection of popular choice. From your perspective in 1950, I gather this development does not come as a complete surprise.

Gouldner: It does not. Particularly when facing crisis situations, individuals come to feel impotent to confront solutions. There is a chapter in the volume in which Alexander Leighton wrote about leadership in communities under stress and in need of some type of correction.

He saw the role of the leader as working to restore the status quo that existed prior to the crisis and to maintain established authority and power relationships.

Spector: That’s a prescription that seeks resolution of crises through adjustment. Leighton was a medical psychiatrist, wasn’t he?

Gouldner: Yes, and a sociologist.

Spector: I find his therapeutic view of crisis resolution as adjustment far too narrow. I’m reminded of David Napoli’s critique of post-World War II psychology as “architects of adjustment” (Napoli, 1981). Sometimes, adjustment to the status quo amounts to acquiescence to an unjust system.

Gouldner: Reestablishing the status quo as an outcome of crisis is only one possible solution; others might with equal legitimacy postulate the very opposite goal.

Spector: And there are many forces that can give rise to a pervasive sense of powerlessness and despair, particularly in situations of heightened stress.

Gouldner: The years in which I prepared the volume were not so far removed from the Second World War. One might well have remembered a pre-Nazi song of German workers that went: “We are like marbles rolled against the wall.” The anxiety-motored drive for security, evoked by a mass sense of powerlessness, finds outlets in a quest for dependence upon leadership.

Spector: Today, many people point to the financial collapse of 2008 as the anxiety-motoring catalyst for popular support of right-wing populism (e.g. Ferguson, 2019; Funke et al., 2018; Mofitt, 2015; Thirkell-White, 2009). You and your contributors didn’t seem to be ruling out the possibility of democratic leaders. What did you take to be the conditions that enabled democratic leadership?

Gouldner: Democratic leaders need to identify emotionally with followers so that their decisions will not be warped by their own personal interests. Guidelines, in the form of constitutional safeguards, are important but not sufficient. Normative attitudes and practices need to be delineated in order to select and retain leaders who can achieve that balance between democratic values and administrative functioning.

There is a chapter in this volume by Leo Lowenthal and Norbert Guterman in which they analyze the “fascist agitator.” The authors seek to correct what they saw as an all-too-common mistake made in America in the postwar years of conceptualizing fascist leaders as carbon copies of a German or Italian model.

Spector: That was an understandable confusion given the temporal closeness to the reality of German Nazism and Italian fascism.

Gouldner: Certainly. But if false, it is a dangerous assumption. What Lowenthal and Guterman argued was that there was a manifestation of the fascist agitator that had roots deep in the American social and character structures.

Spector: Is there an American “character”?

Gouldner: To reflect on that question, let me point you to another chapter, Daniel Bell’s “Authoritarian and Democratic Leadership.” The problem of leadership, he wrote,

… is shaped by the fact that while we live in a society of political democracy, almost all basic patterns are authoritarian and tend to instill feelings of helplessness and dependence. We begin as dependent beings in a family situation. The nature of middle-class morality drives parents to impose basic patterns of conformity which will be subsequently demanded in the schools and in the factory (Bell, 1950: 406).

So, at least according to Bell, there is an American character, one that potentially reinforces authoritarian leadership.

Spector: None of that is uniquely American. Those institutions—patriarchal families, authoritarian schools and workplaces—coexist in a context that pays formal tribute to democratic Enlightenment ideals. In those same authoritarian schools, we all learn that the founding national creed involves a commitment, no matter how flawed in practice, to the assertion that “all men are created equal” and “that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” The United States may not be any more susceptible to fascist and authoritarian appeals that other counties and perhaps less susceptible than some, but neither is it immune to those appeals.

Gouldner: Lowenthal and Guterman analyzed the speeches of homegrown fascists in an attempt to understand just who they were. They found a penchant for direct self-expression and self-advertisement among these native fascists. They wrote that the would-be American fascist leader “does not hesitate to advertise himself. He does not depend on a ‘build-up’ manufactured by subordinates and press agents but does the job himself. He could hardly trust anyone else to paint his self-image in such glowing colors.” Lowenthal and Guterman added that “he does not seem to be inhibited by considerations of good taste” (Lowenthal and Guterman, 1950: 81). And these fascist agitators were always insisting they were aware of diabolic conspiracies.

Spector: We can see today that authoritarians tend rely on dark, absurd, and not infrequently racist and nativist conspiracy theories in their acquisition and maintenance of power (Kranz et al., 2019; Schindler, 2019).

Gouldner: That was the point that I took from their chapter. It has always been disingenuous to think that fascism is something that can only happen somewhere else.

Spector: Novelists ranging from Sinclair Lewis (1935) to Philip Roth (2004) have made that same point.

Gouldner: You mentioned an economic crash, and we saw this also during the Great Depression. Lowenthal and Guterman’s fascist agitators played into and intensified the feelings of despair, isolation, and distrust from which their listeners suffered and from which they longed to escape. And they focused in on economic problems, insisting they possessed secret, mysterious knowledge that allowed them and them alone to construct effective solutions.

Spector: In another chapter, Kurt Lewin wrote:

When the people feel that they are unable to actually determine their own fate, as happened in Europe, when they are disillusioned about the authenticity and effectiveness of democratic processes, they are tempted to surrender the substance of democratic self-determination and to cast their lot with those whom they considered at least powerful: their leaders (Lewin, 1950: 416).

There’s that theme again: alienated people attracted by and to a magic helper. Some of your contributors addressed the question of how best to combat the rise of the so-called fascist agitator.

Gouldner: Look at the chapter by Theodor Adorno, who published his Authoritarian Personality the same year this volume came out. He emphasized the “principle of truth” and the tendency of authoritarians to bend the truth (Adorno, 1950: 429).

Spector: In her 1958 study of totalitarian leaders, notably Hitler and Mussolini, Hannah Arendt found that same tendency among tyrants to make absurd claims in contravention of brute facts; claims that aligned with the reigning biases and perceived interests of their followers (Arendt, 1958).

Gouldner: And Adorno’s message was don’t attempt to combat the truth-bending propaganda of would-be fascists with more truth-bending propaganda. The practice of sticking to facts is both morally superior and more effective. Not that he ignored the psychological phase of communication. But it must always be communicated with respect for the truth. It is the authoritarian, the anti-democratic leader, who traffics in pompous trivialities and absurd lies. Certain personalities will respond better to such appeals than others.

Spector: You’re referencing the authoritarian personality type who, in Adorno’s telling, is someone who combines anxiety with cynicism.

Gouldner: And the vaccine against such appeals, Adorno insisted, was a concertation “on the enlightenment of attitudes, ideologies, and behaviors” (Adorno, 1950: 429).

Spector: I’d like to draw attention to a section of chapters that appear under the heading: “leadership in minorities.” How and why did that come about?

Gouldner: Minority groups are those subordinated to others. Contributors dealt with four minorities: leadership processes among people of the Jewish religion, among Negroes, Italian-Americans, and feminists. For all of these groups, the problem they faced was one of distribution of power.

Spector: In what way should we consider leadership to be a problem when it manifests itself among minority groups?

Gouldner: Kurt Lewin, in “The Problem of Minority Leadership,” suggested that these leaders often existed on the periphery of the minority group they were claiming to lead and thus functioned to meet the needs of the majority more than their own constituents.

Spector: If that was true in 1950, I would suggest those dynamics changed significantly in the 1960s and 1970s. Martin Luther King, for instance, often found himself at odds with the very conservative leaders that Oliver Cox spotlighted in his chapter, “Leadership among Negroes in the United States.” And then various other black leaders, including Malcolm X, challenged King on the same issues (McCarthy, 1992). And during your time at Washington University (1957–1980), the feminist movement evolved dramatically from the groups analyzed in Arnold Green and Eleanor Melnick’s chapter, “What Has Happened to the Feminist Movement?”

Gouldner: Their chapter focused on the lingering impact of the women’s suffrage movement.

Spector: That was one of only two chapters by women, and each was coauthored by a man.

Gouldner: Green and Melnick were well aware—in fact, this was their central point—that women had failed to attain the level of leadership throughout society that their feminist forbearers might have hoped for. To those alert to the problems involved in the defense and extension of democratic values, the position of minority groups in the United States provides a perpetual challenge—and a promise that there is a long, hard row yet to hoe.

Spector: There was so much variety on offer in this volume. I note that you declined to offer a summary chapter. What can you say about the collection overall?

Gouldner: The volume was deliberately designed to offer contesting perspectives and emphases. I wanted to express my dissatisfaction with a formulistic social science that seeks a path followed in utter certitude to a predetermined end. Throughout the chapters, there is a frequently voiced insistence on a social science that is historically and culturally oriented. Many of the articles exemplify the sense that social science has a social problem-solving function, which cannot be performed unless the feudal walls surrounding each discipline are pierced.

Spector: So, the authors were united in a commitment to leadership as a topic that held a promise of some help to people engaged in democratic action.

Gouldner: And implementing those values with whatever scientific competence could be mustered. In short, this was a frankly partisan book.

Spector: That seems to be a never-ending debate in social science scholarship. I’m thinking of the way Howard Becker described it 17 years after Studies in Leadership. Some social scientists, he wrote, advocate for neutrality as a way of conducting “research that is technically correct and value free” (Becker, 1967: 239). Becker maintained that value-free research simply does not exist. I take it that is your sentiment as well.

Gouldner: I referred to it as the myth of a value-free sociology (Gouldner, 1962).

Spector: But is there any danger in becoming so focused on a particular value that you might filter out some contradictory insights?

Gouldner: In Studies in Leadership, no value-choices were insisted upon beyond maintaining that democratic patterns are ethically good for our society. It was not, for example, necessary to entertain propositions asserting that any one organization of the economy was necessary for the retention of democratic values. Conversely, it was not postulated that what some have called, euphemistically, the “free enterprise system” or what certain Marxists have alleged with equivalent fervor to be “socialism” must be either maintained or created in order to further democracy. We proceeded in diversity and unity.

Spector: The problem that you were all addressing in various ways was how to use leadership for realizing democratic goals. There is a debate among contemporary critical scholars concerning any focus on leadership. Some hold, in essence, that the notion of “democratic leadership” is an oxymoron. Others insist that the topic may be analyzed critically without abandoning hope for a democratic leadership that can combat anti-democratic impulses (Collinson, 2017; Learmonth and Morrell, 2017). You and your colleagues seem to be siding with the latter group, holding out hope for democratic leadership.

Gouldner: Yes, we shared a common commitment to democratic values and forms. The question was not how to get along without leadership but how to combine democratic values with effective social organization. A consideration of that challenge is the appropriate role of the social scientist.

Spector: Thank you.

From conversation to discussion

Locating leadership within the realm of social problems places Gouldner well outside of the consensus that had already formed in 1950 and was institutionalized in subsequent decades. With James McGregor Burns’ seminal 1978 Leadership, scholars typically framed leadership in an unproblematically positive way. Leaders are presented as individuals who are passionately committed to optimistic scenarios and utopian goals (Collinson, 2012). A book subtitled How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action (Sinek, 2009), for instance, contained not a hint of caution. Great leaders inspire good action (a “good” defined without any awareness of power, manipulation, or contention). ⁶

Not all leadership scholars have accepted this exclusive positivity associated with leadership. A number, for instance, focused on the “dark side” possibilities of “bad,” “toxic,” “pseudo,” and “inauthentic” leaders (e.g. Bass and Steidlmeier, 1999; Kellerman, 2004; Lin et al., 2017; Lipman-Blumen, 2005; Mathieu et al., 2014). In such cases, it is not the construct of leadership itself that is problematized; rather it is the practice of leadership in the wrong—often neurotic or psychotic—hands (for exceptions, see Price, 2003; Tourish, 2013).

Contemporary critical leadership literature departs from an overload of optimism concerning the possibilities of leadership, problematizing excessive positivity as an encouragement to reckless risk taking on the part of leader (Thaler and Sustein, 2009). Excessive positivity serves to enhance an asymmetry between overly confident leaders and followers who have a more nuanced view of the challenges and opportunities of their organization or society (Cerulo, 2006). That relentless and unrealistic confidence becomes a kind of tyranny that sustains both mass delusion and deliberate self-deception (Ehrenreich, 2009).

Gouldner brooked no such excess. He located the “social problem” in the construct rather than in particular instances of individual bad behavior; in the inherent tension between leader power and follower agency. Leadership was not a sporadic problem but rather an ongoing challenge to and disturbance of democratic values. At the same time, leadership was not a force to be eliminated. The question was not how to get along without leadership, he insisted, but a consideration of how a combination of institutional constraints and normative expectations might shape leader behaviors on behalf of democratic values and effective social organization.

Gouldner’s thoughts on leadership—indeed, his entire body of work on social science theory – were deeply embedded in and profoundly shaped by his analysis of culture and history. How scholars and citizens, understand leadership cannot be “culturally isolated” (Gouldner, 1950: 39). Critical scholarship recognizes historical, cultural, and social positioning as exerting a profound influence on beliefs and actions (Brookfield, 1987). The broad perspective, allows critical social science to take aim “beneath the ordinary complaints and usual oppositions to explore and discuss assumptions and deeper social formations” (Alvesson and Deetz, 2000: 8).

For Gouldner, the foundation of a modern understanding of leadership could be found in the historical juxtaposition of Protestantism and the capitalist usurpation of feudal authority. That formulation—constructing leadership as a learned and earned status rather than an inherited right—allowed Gouldner to assert the problematic nature of the construct. Leadership must always be understood as an ideological weapon aligned on behalf of one social order and in opposition to another. Individuals will attribute positive and negative values to those contesting orders, of course. But there should never be any positioning of leadership as an unalloyed positive or an unaligned (and non-ideological) intervention in an organization or a society.

Gouldner did not present a theory of leadership in his volume. Nor did he build on any specified definition of the construct. Other than expressing skepticism about then-current theories of traits and situational leadership, he avoided any theorizing intended to explicate the dynamics of leadership as exerted by individuals or groups in a social setting. He never returned to leadership as a specific research focus.

The real focal unit of his analysis resided in his subtitle, Leadership and Democratic Action. It was not on leadership per se but on the intersection of leadership and democratic values that Gouldner trained his lens, located the source of what he called a social problem, and asserted the necessity of supporting a democratic bias. That was his positivity, his stated, frankly partisan goal.

His positivity was not excessive, however. Leadership, both in how it was conceptualized and how it was practiced, was inherently and inevitably fraught with danger. Particularly in times of stress, alienated followers would seek “magical” individuals capable of addressing their own perceived shortcomings. The tension between anti-democratic tendencies—a tendency that resides in both leaders and followers—may never be fully settled. The asymmetrical power between the two camps will always assert itself. Social scientists, he insisted, could not shirk the task, even the obligation, to explore the dynamic and the opportunities for redress.