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Leaders as saints: Leadership through moral peak performance
No full textIN C O N T E M P O R A R Y S O C I E T Y and business there is a booming interest in morality. There are debates on equal opportunities in relation to gender, ethnicity, disabilities, age, marketing methods and consumer issues, environ - mental respons ibility, community involvement, business scandals, greed and overpay ment for executives, whistleblowing, issues in the developing world like child labour and bad working conditions, and so on. Increased emphasis on individualism, consumerism and hedonism means that self-interest and egoism become more salient. Feelings of reduced community and increased seculariza tion – combined with a renewed focus on religion – contribute to increased uncertainty around moral issues. Trends are seldom clear-cut, but these devel op ments probably form a background to a contemporary interest in morality. This of course also infuses ideas around leadership. There is an interest in how leaders can address these moral problems involving the interface between leadership and ‘explicitly’ moral phenomena. But the link between leadership and ethics is not constrained to address ‘hot’ issues such as corporate social responsibility and the moral shortcomings of contemporary working life. Most people interested in leadership are concerned more generally with questions such as what a good leader is and what constitutes good leadership. It is surely not a matter of just being tough, intelligent, having a strong will, being persuasive, result-oriented and other possible effectiveness-inducing qualities. It is also very much about being of the right moral stuff, of being good and caring to the subordinates
Ambivalent elites and conservative modernizers : studying sideways in transnational contexts ; paper for the conference 'Alltag der Globalisierung. Perspektiven einer transnationalen Anthropologie', January 16-18, 2003, Institute of Cultural Anthropology and European Ethnology, Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main
No full textSpacially dispersed transnational professional communities can be perceived of as cultural formations living in a global frame of reference, transgressing existing political and cultural boundaries. In their capacity as members of local technical and knowledgebased elites, they take part in circulating and connecting cultural meanings that are both locally produced, and continuously re-working non- local flows. I argue that those elites can be described as actors at cultural interfaces, taking part in shaping and mediating social change. The aim is twofold: one, to point to mutually opposed tendencies, and ambivalences in the framework of a „culture of change“, and two, to look into the question how such situations and groups can be methodologically approached
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