1,721,049 research outputs found
Agonistic governance : the antinomies of decision-making in U.S. Navy SEALS
Get PDFThis article expands organization theory about Wicked, Tame, and Critical problems and their associated decision-making styles, Leadership, Management, and Command, by offering a framework that spans across all three which we call ‘Agonistic Governance’: an approach to decision-making that is premised on the acceptance that complexity generates paradoxes and contradictions and, to be successful, organizational actors must have the agency to positively embrace these, rather than try to eliminate them, recognizing that some failure is the price of overall success. Through an ethnographic study of US Navy SEALs, we suggest that, unlike the cultures of conventional military forces, elite military units can thrive in a leadership environment that is much more subtle, paradoxical and complex, and can be seen as illustrative of Agonistic Governance. Findings reveal that the success of these groups is dependent on the construction of a contradictory decision-making model that recognizes leadership is often as much an art as a science, and an understanding that the willingness to seek out and learn from failure rather than avoid it, is itself part of the solution not the problem. Agonistic Governance offers a way to move from binary thinking rooted in decision-making models that aim to be internally coherent, unilinear and without contradiction, and instead offers a way to accept the irrational and paradoxical prevalent in today’s complex organizational environments. In effect, Wicked Problems an only be addressed by accepting that failure is a prerequisite not a proscription
An ethnographic exploration of the effectiveness of formal leadership development programmes within the context of the UK and New Zealand public sectors
Get PDFThis thesis examines whether formal leadership development programmes can improve the delivery of leadership within the context of four specific sectors. These are UK local government, the UK Fire and Rescue Service, the UK armed services and the New Zealand public services. Theories of leadership development are linked to theories of leadership, with the conclusion drawn that leadership development perspectives are influenced and follow principles of leadership theory. Two broad foci of leadership development are identified, ‘individual’ and ‘collective’. Within these, four particular ‘schools’ of leadership development are discussed in order to establish a guide to consider what may constitute an effective leadership development process - behavioural, authentic, coalition and experiential. These four theoretical models are presented with a view to further testing in the field.
It is suggested that a research method which values and gives voice to the subjective constructions of actors in the process of leadership development should be adopted. The case is made for an ethnographic method – specifically citing its capacity for rich, deep descriptions, data capture over an extended period of time and within a range of settings.
Results are presented offering support for three of the four models presented – authentic, coalition and experiential, but not for behavioural leadership development. The case is made that leadership development programmes, from the perspective of participants and their colleagues, do improve the practice of leadership – at least to a degree. It is stated, however, that it is a basic principle of ethnography that such a finding will always be bound by the context within which the data was gathered.
Furthermore, it is noted that there was evidence present of more than one of the models presented co-existing within leadership development programmes. In fact, where this happened, participants believed a more dramatic improvement had taken place. With this in mind, a synthesis model is suggested, which seeks to view leadership development as a sensemaking process, rather than as a series of separate events
Mindfulness in action : discovering how Navy SEALs build capacity for mindfulness in high-reliability organizations
Get PDFThis study of US Navy Sea Air and Land (SEALs) commandos contributes to the research investigating mindfulness in High-Reliability Organizations (HROs) by identifying micro- and macro-level influences that allow SEALs to build capacity for mindful behaviors and flexible responses despite the complexity of their missions, unpredictability of their operating environments, and inherent danger of their work. Although HRO literature defines five hallmarks of mindfulness, how frontline people working in HROs create a state of collective mindfulness is not often investigated. This study addresses this gap through an empirical exploration of ‘mindfulness in action’ as a way to link individual mindfulness traits and organizational mindfulness influences, providing a more nuanced conceptualization of one hallmark of mindfulness—a preoccupation with failure—and offering a new sixth factor that allows HROs to perform in a near error-free manner: comfort with uncertainty and chaos. These discoveries open up new
avenues of HRO research for a wide range of reliability-seeking
organizations
Networking constructions of gender and constructing gender networks : considering definitions of women in the British Cervical Screening Programme
No full textIn this chapter, the author traces how she has used Actor Network Theory (ANT) and how she has developed the approach through its application to the Cervical Screening Programme (CSP). She demonstrates ways in which her feels ANT might be a useful tool for feminists approaching science. For feminists, the object of science has been consistently coded as ‘woman’, hence woman has received the same treatment. The author suggests that feminist approaches and ANT, as diverse as they both are in their own right, appear to have similar theoretical developmental trajectories expressing analogous ambivalences and facing the same dilemmas, at this historical moment. Using ANT terminology, the British government could be seen to have simplified and juxtaposed a series of entities into a network of associations that make up the CSP. ANT looks at science and society as co-evolving from the definition and positioning of non-human and human entities into a network of associations - an actor network
Leadership, management and command : rethinking D-Day
No full textThe author argues that the successes and failures of D-Day, on both sides, cannot be explained simply by comparing the competing strategies of each side. Instead he provides an account of the battle through the overarching nature of the relationship between the leaders and their followers
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
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Political leadership
No full textFrom one point of view, all organisations include a political dimension, in that those who lead, work for, manage, govern and contract to organisations have to deal with diverse and sometimes competing interests, with individuals and groups sometimes vying for power and influence and sometimes collaborating with others to achieve outcomes (Hartley and Fletcher 2008). This is politics with a smal "p".
However, this chapter focuses on leadership in formal political systems - what might be called "big P" politics. And the focus is on leadership in democratic societies, i.e. where political leadership is based on electoral legitimacy from, and accountability to, the population, rather than leadership based on military or totalitarian power
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
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