The Social Development of Leadership and Knowledge

How do you find out something new about your work? How will you know you have found something, when you do not know what you are looking for? How useful might what you find be to others? As you attempt this task, how might you feel? And, how might what you contribute at your workplace (including your leadership impact) change? We have taken these questions seriously, and they generate a structure for the five parts of this book.

The two metaphorical cities of this chapter are the cities of knowledge and of practice. The chapter is about a journey from research to practice.

In the previous chapter we looked at where Venkatesh’s curiosity landed him; now I, Rob Warwick, consider where my own curiosity has landed me. This chapter aims to offer a number of insights:

Knowledge is about something. In this chapter we move from the section of the library that has books about knowledge to the section that has books about leadership. We cannot choose a practice that we and all our readers will find equally germane; however, leadership is an example of practical action of which all of us have some experience, whether from trying to lead or from being led (in many cases both); before entering the library we share some of our experience. Leadership is also a practice that looks starkly different when viewed from our two cities.

Knowledge not only builds on what has gone before but is produced within specific social, economic and historical conditions. In this chapter we attend to some of the contributions to the library, specifically around complexity, which could only be made from the second half of the twentieth century onwards. At that time, initial and then increasingly rapid leaps in computing power made it possible to observe the evolution of systems (like the weather, or human or other biological populations) too complex to be explained by simple equations.

We come in the next two chapters to the conclusion of our visit to the library, and to the theme of reflexivity. This chapter sets the scene for a more intense development in Chapter 7, in which we will draw on Pierre Bourdieu’s logic of practice to propose a way of understanding all that we do together to create knowledge, leadership or anything else that is important to us. We interpret Bourdieu’s work in a way that extends the insights into complexity and power discussed in the previous chapter and underpins the proposals in Part III for creating new knowledge and more effective leadership.

In the preceding chapter we explored a number of different ways of understanding reflexivity: in this chapter we will take up one at greater length. Why? As we will see in the next section, reflexivity was a concept of central importance to Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002), whose work spread across philosophy, anthropology and sociology, culminating in his appointment as Professor of Sociology at the Collège de France. However, that alone would not be a sufficient justification.

In the field of management and leadership there is an array of models, templates, methodologies and frameworks for the practitioner and the researcher. They are offered to enable us to understand our world, communicate our point, to understand and influence others, and to make and justify decisions. However, without the ability to think reflexively they can prove to be ‘empty vessels’, lacking meaning and context. Indeed, we often see the unthinking use of frameworks whereby practitioners ‘shoe horn’, or objectify, their experience into structures they have been presented with or think they have to use, as opposed to giving thought to questions such as: how does this framework help or hinder my understanding of the situation; how has it affected my paying attention to what is happening; how am I responding to what I am experiencing with others; how is my experience now being affected by the sweep of time? We are not advocating the rejection of frameworks and methodologies; they are a vital means by which we understand our world. However, here we describe a way of thinking with others that enables attention to be paid to the disturbing details of what is happening as we do organisational work. Therefore, we are not trying to build another technique (for, say, ‘managing change’) but a way of remaining attentive to experience as we engage with methods, frameworks and templates and each other.

The interpretation of Bourdieusian reflexivity developed in Chapter 7 has the potential to illuminate the nature of knowledge and the process by which, as researchers into organisations and management, we add to it. In this chapter we set out this claim and then aim to demonstrate it, by shedding new light on the discourse on leadership that we left in Chapter 4. We think that is a worthwhile contribution to make. But there is more. Yes, research can illuminate leadership, and if new insight can be offered in a confusing field, all the better. But the converse is true as well: raising the quantity or quality of knowledge may require leadership. Both are complex social processes; both processes are intertwined.

In Chapter 2 Rob explored some of his experience of doing doctoral research culminating in his viva. Now Douglas, writing as the ‘I’ of this chapter, explores some of his experience from the viva onwards, trying to publish and talk about his research, wrestling with questions of identity, and putting this alongside his simultaneous experience of leading. I begin with the latter, to give a sense of the place and time from which I am writing.

The purpose of this chapter is to give a view of the reflexive journey of writing this book, which spanned approximately 12 months. In other words, to give a sense of the social experience of writing by exploring vision, courage and conflict in a process that mattered to us. It conveys the development of thought as well as those moments of ‘stuckness’ as we worked on the book together and engaged others with its development. The chapter is written from the perspective of one author, Rob, who conceived the idea of the book and led the process of inviting engagement by others.

In this final chapter we reflect on the changing relationship between knowledge and leadership that we have explored in these pages; we summarise what we hope to have contributed according to whether your primary interest is in action or in ideas; and we conclude with an invitation to explore your own practice.