There is no such thing as leadership!

Try out this idea for size: "Leadership" is a reified concept. That is to say, the idea of leadership is constructed from a variety of behaviors (by presumed leaders) and from a variety of experiences by "followers". However, while the concept as a culturally transmitted idea serves useful purposes, there is in reality no such "thing" as leadership.

Think about "leadership functions" or "leader behaviors" instead of about "leadership". Then consider for any particular situation or group or organization what might be the optimal distribution/organization of those functions and behaviors. Do they need to be collected together in a single role/status? Or can they most effectively be distributed among the members of the group/organization??

Our culture leads us (!) to assume that a "leader" is needed, when in fact what is needed is that certain functions be satisfied, certain behaviors performed. Maybe they can be spread out among all the members of a group/organization? Sometimes, at least? . . . (And maybe in the long run that will work better for everyone concerned?)

(Cf., "participatory leadership," "democratic leadership," "group dynamics," "process governance," "distributed leadership," "participatory democracy.")

OWS clearly has gone in this direction.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The market should peak within three weeks

" If the duration of the current rally were to take the same portion of its ruling cycle that the 1929-1930 rally did, when would it end? The 1929-1930 rally lasted 155 days out of 968 in the cycle (1932 was a leap year), for a ratio of 0.1601. The 16.6-16.9-year span ends between February 19 and June 9, 2016. Applying the 0.1601 ratio to this period of 2541-2652 days from the March 6, 2009 low would give rally durations of 406.81-424.59 days, suggesting a peak in the current rally between April 16 and May 5. Using intraday turning dates projects exactly the same range. As Beautiful Pictures shows, time targeting usually works out to within 3 days. With April 14 already behind us and May 8 a Saturday, we can project a top on this basis between April 15 and may 7, 2010. April 16, by the way, marks the anniversary of the 1930 rally peak. These dates pertain only if the current rally matches its predecessor in percent-of-cycle terms, which is conjecture, but given all the other evid
Read more

How can an atheist be moral?

 posted originally on Apr 21, 2017, 2:27 PM       A student quotes his textbook: "morality is a bad fit within the contemporary atheistic world view because there is no good reason to think that creatures who evolved intelligence through purely naturalistic mechanisms would have evolved the ability to correctly discern the content of necessarily true, general moral principles" I replied: To the contrary, secular humanism, an atheist philosophy, is intensely moral. Its morality comes from two sources: 1) a rational argument that cooperation is not only more beneficial to individuals than conflict or competition, but also that it is structurally necessary in order that it be possible for individuals to live together; 2) a scientific understanding that the source of psychological individuality is group membership, interaction with family in infancy and early childhood and interaction with peers and other community members in later life.
Read more

Political Correctness

There's a history to this. I'll be brief.   The social constructionists in general, in particular one of the originators of this approach, the sociologist, Erving Goffman, have revealed clearly what everybody already knew anyway, but hadn't seen it systematically as a major aspect of the processes of social stratification and the enforcement of existing stratification regimes. What was pointed out is the fact that how you talk about someone, how you talk to them, is a major means of exerting social control over them. Particularly, to insult a person is to demean them, to tell them that they are "less than" and to interactionally maneuver them into the position of subordinate to you. Insult a man and he's either got to fight back or accept the insult, accept a position in the interaction of less respect and less power than you who insults him. This is not a matter of “feeling insulted,” but a matter of self-defense in something like micro-class warfare. (That’s
Read more