The Fallacy of Misplaced Leadership*

Journal of Management Studies 42:6 September 2005 0022-2380 The Fallacy of Misplaced Leadership* Martin Wood University of York  The leadership literature typically talks about the discrete individuality of its subject and particularly the personal qualities and capabilities of a few key people occupying top positions in a hierarchy. Current leadership research now has begun to generate new knowledge about leadership practice in relations of interpersonal exchange. Nevertheless, there is an urgent need for the ramifications of this insight to be more sufficiently developed. The current discussion explores how a perspective of process studies challenges the dominance of the field by individual social actors and discrete schemes of relations. Its aims are twofold. First, it will show how both of these latter epistemologies are lacking and suggest that current leadership research and development activities must rise to the ontological challenge of processes rather than things. Second, it looks at some methodological implications of this way of thinking as a productive incitement to future management studies. INTRODUCTION What leadership is has been an enigma of social democracy since the classical philosopher-kings of Plato. It also remains a perennial issue in management studies, with significant debate concerning the problem of understanding the nature and role of leadership. Are leaders (extraordinarily) necessary? Do leaders pull their followers or do those behind push them? Or, are our theories of leadership too static and individualistic (see, for example, Gemmill and Oakley, 1992; Grint, 1997; Hosking, 1988)? Early approaches treated the individual personality traits of key people as critical – the so-called ‘great man’ or ‘qualities’ approach – (Stogdill, 1950). However, Stogdill concluded leadership could not be pinned down through the isolation of a set of traits. This led to a twofold focus on styles and acquirable skills rather than Address for reprints: Martin Wood, Senior Lecturer in Social Theory and Organisation, Department of Management Studies, Sally Baldwin Buildings, University of York, Heslington, York YO10 5DD, UK ([email protected]). © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2005. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ , UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. 1102 M. Wood inherited qualities. Contingency models allocate significance to the personality characteristics of the individual leader and the context of the environment, believing both determine the kind of leadership behaviour required (Fiedler, 1967). Similarly, transactional models define a good leader as someone who integrates getting the job done with concern for those actually doing the work (Blake and Mouton, 1964). Modern leadership research extends this focus on the transactions between leaders and followers. Situational analyses allow the individual leader a degree of flexibility in generating a repertoire of styles (Hersey and Blanchard, 1977). Hersey and Blanchard’s (1977) model centres on the contingency of follower maturity as an indicator of necessary style from directing to supporting and delegating. Unfortunately, the theory and data remain ambiguous and equivocal (Pfeffer, 1977) and raise doubts as to whether thinking of leadership as the personal causation of individual social actors is very helpful. For example, are leaders able to alter their style to suit the situation? Are assumptions about the significance of maturity allocated to the individual follower objectively or subjectively measured? If they are subjective, whose view is taken (Rickards, 1999)? In a study of political leadership in liberal democracies, Elgie (1995) suggests leadership style does make a difference. Nevertheless, successful leadership is exercised within a context of macro social and institutional structures, whose norms and rules govern individual leader behaviour. Heifetz (1994) anticipates this problem, arguing the critical issue is whether people have the ability, motivation and perhaps the freedom to intervene in those situations requiring ‘adaptive’ responses (i.e. leadership). Furthermore, the shift in emphasis over recent years, from planned goals to visions, from communication to trust, from traits to self awareness and from contingency to effective presentation, distinguishes between economically driven models of transactionalleadership and the transformational, and sometimes transcendent, appearance of leaders (Bass, 1985). Such individuals ‘move followers to go beyond their self-interests to concerns for their group or organization’ (Bass and Avolio, 1997, p. 202). Transformational leadership may simply mark a ‘sanitized’ return to neo-traitism (Rickards, 1999), however, elevating those qualities filling followers with longing and desire and so ultimately represent a blatant retreat to the ‘discredited heroics’ of stand alone leaders (Gronn, 2002, p. 426). A problem with such ‘individualistic’ approaches is the psychological origin of much of the theory and data. An assumption is that leaders have certain ‘essential’ qualities and capabilities that can be identified, measured and developed. This literature imagines leadership is best studied by assigning its ‘appearance’ to a few key people. It presupposes only certain individuals can be leaders, only certain leaders are appropriate for certain contingencies, or only certain individuals have sufficient flexibility in their leadership styles to match the needs of a number of different situations. Furthermore, this viewpoint represents the dominant and ‘seductive game’ (Calás and Smircich, 1991) of leaders as meaning creating sub© Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2005 The Fallacy of Misplaced Leadership 1103 jects (Hosking, 1988; Smircich and Morgan, 1982). It is leaders who impress others; inspire people; push through transformations; get the job done; have compelling, even gripping, visions; stir enthusiasm; and have personal magnetism (Maccoby, 2000). Thus, leaders are seen as Prime Movers rather than as emergent phenomena within leaderful situations. Such identity-locating attributes turn out to be more prescriptive than descriptive, however. Managers may well need to do these things, but simply doing them does not privilege them as ‘leader’ nor as someone who can be the cause of ‘leadership’. Such prescriptions simplify and may not be the most appropriate units of analysis within new and ‘virtual’ modes of organizing, whose speed, simultaneity and interconnectivity are now forcing a new kind of encounter with the phenomenon of leadership. Inspired by the process studies of the British mathematical physicist and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1967a, 1967b, 1978), as well as those of his contemporary Henri Bergson (1921, 1974, 1983, 1991, 1999), the current discussion engages with our excessive preoccupation with the psychological approach to leadership. It starts with the conjecture that leadership is best understood as a process rather than a property or thing. Our construal of leadership does not reveal some combinatory series of clear and distinct elements (for example, leaders and followers) ‘each one, being, included in itself and including only itself ’ (Deleuze, 1993, p. 44). Looked at from the perspective of process each individual element can be seen to permeate and melt into one another without dissolving into independent parts. Whitehead (1967a) similarly points to the qualities of an enduring individual part already pervading the constitution of those parts succeeding it. In other words, the actual character of leadership extends into a portion of another as a relation or continuity of flow rather than a solid state. The current discussion explores this claim before mounting a challenge to the hegemony of more omniscient leadership models. At this stage the discussion is meant to be suggestive rather than conclusive. Its limited aim is to make a plausible case for process thought in management studies in the belief that this can help rigorously explain both the phenomenon of leadership and for the purpose of imaginatively explicating contemporary organizational problems – complex interpersonal relations, change management, or internationalization, for example. PROCESS STUDIES Process metaphysics is a distinctive sector of philosophical tradition. Its basic doctrine opposes the commonplace Western metaphysic that the nature of reality is ‘here, now, immediate, and discrete’ (Whitehead, 1967b, p. 180). By contrast, process metaphysics is committed to the fundamentally processual nature of the real and the terms of reference in which this reality is to be explained and understood. It stresses inter-relatedness and holds ‘that processes rather than things best represent the phenomenon that we encounter in the natural world about us’ © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2005 1104 M. Wood (Rescher, 1996, p. 2). The guiding idea is that ‘process is the concrete reality of things’ (Griffin, 1986, p. 6; original emphasis). In general, process studies seek to emphasize emergence and becoming rather than sheer existence or being (Chia, 1996). They rest on the premise of openness in the progress of human experience and civilization. Life and society are conceived as a process of creative advance in which many past events are integrated in the events of the present, and in turn are taken up by future events – just as people living in Europe are affected by particles released from Chernobyl, so too do business practices in Japan affect the global community. The ‘interconnectedness’ (Whitehead, 1967b, p. 227) and the ‘mutual penetration’ (Bergson, 1921, p. 101) of these physical, social and economic processes often seem ineffable and mysterious. Because of this our theories of movement and endurance unwittingly reconstruct experience into concrete ‘things’, each one of which touches ‘without penetrating one another’ (Bergson, 1921, p. 101); in a word, we take a number of abstract states, which we set ‘side by side in such a way as to perceive them simultaneously, no longer in one another, but alongside one another’ (Bergson, 1921, p. 101). The key insight of process studies, however, is how the reality of something existing ‘concretely in itself without transition’ (Whitehead, 1967a, p. 49) is a matter of abstractive thinking and not a property of the underlying thing itself. Concrete things – for example, leaders, followers, and organizations – are surface effects. They are simple appearances we employ to give substantiality to our experience, but under whose supposed ‘naturalness’ the fundamentally processual nature of the real is neglected. This unwitting intellectual strategy continues to inform management studies. We may be thinking of business gurus, policy makers, political leaders, spiritual teachers, fashion icons, pop idols, and sporting heroes, but in all these senses an individual social actor is a prerequisite for ‘leadership’. Our abstract habits distinguish an individual actor from everything they are not, as being one thing but not another – a self-identical ‘It’, that is clear and distinct. In doing so we tend to disregard the significance of the internal heterogeneity, or ‘milieu’ (Deleuze, 1994, p. 211) of an individual, even though they cannot be distinguished or isolated from it. When we establish the personal identity of leaders, for example, we often do so in relation to a set of distinguishing qualities. Such normative qualities can fill followers with longing, desire, and envy, which in turn require regulation, control, denial, exclusion, or, alternatively, sublimation and catharsis. By focusing on the individual leader as the omniscient character of those qualities, however, we might be colluding in extant power relations. For Whitehead (1967a, p. 51), this individualistic way of thinking is an example of the error of mistaking our abstract conceptualizations for the concrete things themselves: the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. To overcome this, it is necessary to explore and question the conventional view that an individual social actor’s ‘identity’ can obtain in a secure and concrete sense, without any reference to past, present and future events. Whitehead attempts © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2005 The Fallacy of Misplaced Leadership 1105 to do this by deliberately reframing the individual social actor as ‘a mode of attention’, one that only provides ‘the extreme of selective emphasis’ (Whitehead, 1967b, p. 270). The critical issue in process studies, therefore, is not the actual qualities of an individual social actor, but how such an actor ‘condenses within itself . . . a multitude of social dimensions and meanings’ (Cooper, 1983, p. 204). Looked at this way, leadership is not located in ‘the autonomous, self-determining individual with a secure unitary identity [at] the centre of the social universe’ (Alvesson and Deetz, 2000, p. 98). On the contrary, the emergence of leadership is more properly described as a ‘systematic complex of mutual relatedness’ (Whitehead, 1967a, p. 161), one in which our conceptual interpretations are always ‘an incompletion in the process of production’ (Whitehead, 1978, p. 327). Leadership is found neither in one person or another, nor can it be simply located between several people. Instead it is ‘the point of difference’ (Cooper, 1983, p. 204) at which each turns around the other. In this sense, leadership is already a ‘complete’ relation, where the relation is the thing itself and each part necessarily refers to another, but without ‘completion’ in a straightforward way. Leadership cannot be reduced to an individual social actor or to discrete relations among social actors. Rather, it is the unlocalizable ‘in’ of the ‘between’ of each, a freely interpenetrating process, whose ‘identity’ is consistently self-differing. THE MISPLACING OF LEADERSHIP We have seen how the affirmation ‘leaders make things happen’ is an obvious and rarely questioned way of thinking. Indeed, it is inherent in management studies to consider ‘the leader as consistent essence, a centred subject with a particular orientation’ (Alvesson and Sveningsson, 2003, p. 961). This individualistic way of thinking is now widespread. Consider the BBC’s recent searches for the Greatest Briton (2002) and the Greatest American (BBC, 2003), or, more seriously, in the events following the September 11 attacks, the tendency of the West to look toward key figures to exercise ‘leadership’ and to entrust individual commanders-in-chief with the power to go to war. Consider also the 2004 US presidential campaign in which the electorate are urged to pick candidates as much on personality as on key issues. For example, candidates whose backgrounds and qualifications for office are not well known tend to use biographical advertisements to present the most favourable versions of their life stories – John Kerry volunteered to serve in Vietnam where his ‘leadership, courage, and sacrifice earned him a Silver Star, a Bronze Star with Combat V, and three Purple Hearts’ (Kerry-Edwards, 2004) – or else the words, or image, of a candidate are used against them to show that the candidate cannot be believed, or has broken a promise: ‘There’s what Kerry says and then there’s what Kerry does’ (Bush-Cheney, 2004), or to show that the candidate is in touch with the concerns and feelings of ‘real people’ – or that the opponent is not: ‘The © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2005 1106 M. Wood America that George Bush has created is one with fewer jobs, increasing health costs and more obstacles to achieving the American dream’ (Kerry-Edwards, 2004). It is the same with charismatic, effective, visionary and transformational leadership. These beliefs in leadership often attribute power to individual social actors and it is they whom cause events (Gemmill and Oakley, 1992). UK management consultants Goffee and Jones (2000, p. 64) characterize an inspirational leader as needing ‘vision, energy, authority, and strategic direction’ so as to ‘engage people and rouse their commitment to company goals’ (Goffee and Jones, 2000, p. 63). Moreover, those who are led often find the responsibility a leader assumes for visioning and strategic direction to be important and comforting (Bolman and Deal, 1994). People look to a leader to frame and concretize their reality (Smircich and Morgan, 1982). What gets to count as real, however, is often a consequence of incipient power. For example, leaders may seek to extend managerial control in the name of practical autonomy through a project of strengthening or changing an organization’s culture. They might try to promote quality, flexibility and/or responsiveness improvement by ensuring subordinate commitment to an instrumental structure of feeling and thought (Willmott, 1993). The misleading conviction lying behind each of these projects is the existence of an order of ‘completed’ things through which the individual leaders of our experience are apprehended (Whitehead, 1967a, p. 27). But the leader ‘is always social first and only mistakenly claims the personal self as the origin of experience’ (Alvesson and Deetz, 2000, p. 97). We conceive certain qualities or characteristics of ‘leaders’; there is something about them we note. We then find somebody who possesses these qualities or characteristics and it is through them we apprehend the individual person. In other words, the individual social actor is the material of which we predicate the qualities and characteristics. A number of interconnected issues and key questions can be introduced to debate our ascription of leadership to individual social actors (Pfeffer, 1977). For example: How, precisely, are these key individuals identified? What if their exemplary conduct and attitudes turn out to be important symbols representing the choice of a social collectivity? Might this lead to the selection of only those individuals who match the socially constructed image? Does this suggest the primacy of social relations above individual behaviour? If we want to determine whether a leader is charismatic, for example, we might ask in what sense is their charisma a personal quality? Apart from other people would the leader be charismatic? Logically a leader cannot be charismatic in a vacuum. In other words, charisma, effectiveness, vision, and transformation only appear as personal qualities because we have mistaken our abstraction of them for concrete reality. What is at stake, in all of these issues and questions, is our identification of/with ‘the leader’ but, as we have already pointed out, this abstraction is a purposive emanation from the ‘indeterminate © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2005 The Fallacy of Misplaced Leadership 1107 ultimate reality’ (Griffin, 1986, p. 136) and not a property of the underlying thing itself. Gilbert Simondon (1992) continues this line of thought in his essay Genesis of the Individual. For Simondon, what is required is a complete change in mental habit, one in which the process of individuation is considered instead of a misplaced focus on extant social actors. As he puts it: ‘. . . to grasp firmly the nature of individuation, we must consider the being not as a substance, or matter, or form, but as a tautly extended and supersaturated system’ (Simondon, 1992, p. 301). According to Simondon, the problem of individuation continues to be formulated either in ‘substantialist’ terms of the completed individual or the ‘hylomorphic’ operation of completion. The first view expresses a complete determinateness of the individual. In this it looks a lot like management studies, which treats the substantial appearance of leaders as unproblematic and sees the process of their individuation ‘as something to be explained, rather than as something in which the explanation is to be found’ (Simondon, 1992, p. 299). These normative strategies ‘aim toward achieving a presence of person qua the ideal of the classical subject’ (Day, 1998, p. 96). Each presumes ‘leadership is all about the person at the top of the hierarchy’ (Barker, 2001, p. 471), or else provides examples of a ‘first among equals’ (Gronn, 2002, p. 430), bypassing the constitutive processes through which such figures are created. The second view does not presuppose any absolutely distinct individuality, but does assume a teleological matterform relation putting the principle into effect. Terms such as ‘charismatic leadership’ (Conger and Kanungo, 1998), ‘servant leadership’ (Greenleaf, 1977, 1998), ‘intelligent leadership’ (Hooper and Potter, 2000) and ‘transformational leadership’ (Bass, 1985), all call to mind the clear idea of a relation between things. Here, the finite circumstances in one term provide a model for the other to aspire to. In the above examples, ‘charisma’, ‘service’, ‘intelligence’, and ‘transformation’, are all preconceived conditions or functions anticipating realization in present leadership behaviour. The origin of individuality, therefore, is thought to be either an idealized social actor exercising influence on external circumstances, or a discrete relation capable of reconciling singular terms. Either way, the process of individuation is not thought to be capable of supplying the principle itself. In both cases, Simondon (1992) argues, the tendency is to understand the problem of individuation retrospectively from the principle of things completed (the end of a process), rather than from the perspective of the process of individuation, in which their correlation is an already complete relation (process itself). It is this point management studies often misses. It typically places the individual social actor at the centre of its accounts and thereby forgets this individual is already a synthesis of differences, not linked through some principle of identity, but through irreducibly heterogeneous processes, which surround and suffuce it. © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2005 1108 M. Wood PROCESS AS ONTOLOGY AND EPISTEMOLOGY Contemporary leadership research has now begun to pay attention to leadership as a process of individuation, rather than as an individual social actor (see, for example, Barker, 2001; Gemmill and Oakley, 1992; Gronn, 2002; Hosking, 1988; Yukl, 1999). Such approaches variously define leadership as ‘a process of transformative change’ (Barker, 2001, p. 491), or a created socio-cultural ‘myth’ to ward off feelings of uncertainty, ambivalence, and instability (Gemmill and Oakley, 1992). Hosking (1988) points to leadership as a skilful process of reality constructions and shifting influence and Yukl (1999, p. 292) emphasizes how this process is shared, thereby ‘enhancing the collective and individual capacity of people to accomplish their work roles effectively’. Gronn’s (2002) dissatisfaction with individualism leads him to suggest distributed leadership as a technical solution to the idealized figure of the leader as a creating and influencing subject, set apart from social relations. He defines leadership as relations of ‘reciprocal influence’: AÆB and BÆA and sees distributed leadership as a ‘concertive action’ extending the existing unit of analysis to include leadership as joint action, rather than simply aggregated or individual acts. Pettigrew (1997), operating in the allied fields of strategy and organizational change, expresses a closely related point. He perceptively argues that process is ‘a sequence of individual and collective events, actions and activities unfolding over time in context’ (p. 338). On his view, process is epistemology we can put to work in explaining strategy and organizational change and ‘catch this reality in flight’, so to speak (Pettigrew, 1997, p. 338). Nevertheless, this outlook maintains an extant matter-form relation and importantly fails to recognize the fundamentally processual nature of the real (cf. Chia, 1996, pp. 195–204; Chia, 1999; Tsoukas and Chia, 2002). It also contrasts sharply with the thesis offered by Whitehead, for whom process is specifically of ontological concern. From a process-as-ontology perspective, Pettigrew’s (1997) contribution does not in itself overturn the commonsense recognition of process as something to be entered into, as an external relation between individual social actors, whose individuality can exist without the relation. In other words, rather than recognizing reality ‘in flight’, his process-as-epistemology attends only to those aspects of concrete experience that lie within some discrete scheme of relations. Pettigrew sees process as bounded by human agency and employed as a mode of attention or critical factor in fixing individuals, events, actions and activities in space. As such, he does not provide a pervasive account of the processual nature of the real in time. Each of these contributions has considerable merit in helping us to rethink our epistemological commitments. Nevertheless, the ramifications of their insights will be more sufficiently developed ‘only if their calls for a greater attention to process lead to a consistent reversal of the ontological priority’ (Tsoukas and Chia, 2002, p. 570). Two useful problematizations of the epistemological focus on process in © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2005 The Fallacy of Misplaced Leadership 1109 management studies have been Hosking’s work in a relational perspective (see, for example, Brown and Hosking, 1986; Dachler and Hosking, 1995; Hosking, 1988, 2001; Hosking and Morley, 1991) and Barker’s (2001) definition of leadership as a process of transformative change. Hosking uses the terms ‘processes’ and ‘relations’ in order to point out the ongoing connections that construct social realities. Here, her concern is with asking how relational processes are involved in the development of leadership. This relational perspective strongly resembles a ‘moderate’ social constructionist philosophy (Burningham and Cooper, 1999) and expresses a closely related line of argument to Berger and Luckmann’s (1966) original thesis of reality construction. However, Hosking does not start with the presumption of discrete relations between singular terms (for example, AÆB and BÆA) and, therefore, has to find some other way to speak of what is related to what. By refusing to reproduce certain taken-for-granteds about what can be known about processes and relations, Hosking leaves their nature open to conjecture, and so begins to explore ontology. Barker (2001) also attempts to provide important metaphysical support for this endeavour. He too believes the problem of studying leadership as stabilized forms of various unpredictable social processes lies in the, perhaps inevitable, tendency to separate leaders from ‘the complex and continuous relationships of people and institutions’ (Barker, 2001, p. 483). He too argues the error is in assuming that the personal causation of an individual social actor can explain the complex and continuous ‘nature of leadership’. Leadership, he claims, ‘is precisely the complex and continuous relationships of people and institutions’ and these ‘must be the foci of the explanation of leadership’ (Barker, 2001, p. 483). Barker endorses Pfeffer’s (1977) earlier argument, believing leadership to be a ‘direct, phenomenological experience’ (Barker, 2001, p. 483). Leadership is a ‘dissipative system . . . continually renewing itself within a dynamic context’ (Barker, 2001, p. 487). Whatever we experience as leadership is itself transforming as a part of the system; the macrosystem continually changes as a part of the transformation. It is this ontological, rather than epistemological, character of transformation and relatedness we can invoke to appreciate leadership as process. Appropriating Cooper’s (1998, p. 171) terminology, the process of leadership is ‘always momentary, tentative and transient . . . [it] occurs in that imperceptible moment between the known and the unknown’. Instead of approaching leadership simply as the has/has not qualities and capabilities of individual social actors – whose conduct may be termed ‘leaderful’ by their conformation to the perfection of some hoped for ideal, or else by reason of some fortunate spontaneity within a situation – it is the relation itself, the both/and sharing or ‘vacillating interaction’ (Cooper, 1987) of subjective form and advantageous circumstance that should be our logical subject. As we have already seen, the advantage of confining our attention to self-identical figures is we confine our thoughts to clear-cut definite things with clear-cut © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2005 1110 M. Wood definite relations. Nothing in our experience, however, actually possesses the character of simple location. To so confine our experience is an example of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, to which Whitehead (1967a) refers. Such a mechanistic view presupposes ‘the ultimate fact of a brute matter, or material, spread throughout space . . . following a fixed routine imposed by external relations which do not spring from the nature of its being’ (Whitehead, 1967a, p. 17). It has the disadvantage, however, of neglecting events and functions important to our experience. The result is a ‘one-eyed reason, deficient in its vision of depth’ (Whitehead, 1967a, p. 59), and which, once again, does not re-establish the continuity of leadership as process. So, whilst we may not be able to think without the selective pressures eliciting clear-cut definite things, we ought to be more critical of our basic distinctions and divisions. Our conception of leadership is only a fleeting glimpse of a qualitative movement of difference that has a certain ‘internal resonance requiring permanent communication’ (Simondon, 1992, p. 305). If we want to trace this internal qualitative movement we must start to investigate the question of individuation itself. Here, our concern is with revaluing an individual social actor’s constitutive milieu in all its variety. This will require us to rethink our ontological priorities. AN EMANATION OF THE EXCLUDED MIDDLE The principle of the excluded middle is an example of classical Aristotelian logic. It has a marked bias toward things and substances, which it conceives as either having or not having a certain definiteness of being, a natural existence that is subject to a law of all or nothing – i.e. A is either B or not B – (Andrews, 1996). In the current discussion, this amounts to some positive quality or substantial character of an individual social actor in opposition to a lacking other. The principle of the excluded middle also suggests the concept of ‘exclusion’: to shut out; to hinder from entrance or admission; to debar from participation or enjoyment; to deprive of; to except, etc, which appears to rule out the possibility of a middle ground between is/is not and either/or axioms, as a third state, or mediating position. Hegel’s dialectical synthesis offers a partial solution to this problem. For Hegel, once the individual social actor is no longer treated as a thing-in-itself, it ceases to have any positive quality or essence. Any subsequent quality is marked only in the process of negating its nothingness. To continue to be definite a figure must actively engage with (negate) what it is not. For example, A is not B and B is not A. This negative reciprocation enables Hegel to declare all differences can be mediated in an Identity of identity and opposition: there can be no identity prior to its relation to others – which is both negative and oppositional (Widder, 2002). Without this opposition ‘being will fade into nothingness’ (Hardt, 1993, pp. 3–4). Logically, however, it also consolidates the place of the opposite and identifies it – the ‘not B’ is itself an identity. Thus Hegel’s dialectical movement continues to rely on an © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2005 The Fallacy of Misplaced Leadership 1111 identity-politics, in which each empirical figure ‘through its own nature relates itself to the other’ (Hegel, quoted in Houlgate, 1999, p. 99). The dual nature of this relationship means that identity (self ) and difference (other) are reconciled and so his displacement of quality or essence is only partial. From a process-as-ontology perspective the reciprocal movement of negation is a misleading notion of difference. Hegel’s ‘dialectic of negation . . . fails to grasp the concreteness and specificity of real being’ (Hardt, 1993, p. 4). The necessary quality of leadership we can outline here is positive difference, ‘a positive internal movement’ (Hardt, 1993, p. 14). This necessary quality is not definite individuality per se, but rather ‘an undefined number of potential individualities’ (Bergson, 1983, p. 261; original emphasis). According to Bergson (1983, p. 230) our mistake ‘is due to the fact that the “vital” order, which is essentially creation, is manifested to us less in its essence than in some of its accidents . . . like it, they present to us repetitions that make generalization possible’. However, as Bergson (1983, pp. 230–1) continues: ‘There is no doubt that life as a whole is an evolution, that is an unceasing transformation’. In other words, it is continuity that defines the composition of the real. Its ‘accidents’, by contrast, are simply a juxtaposition of points ‘imitating’ this vital order. As such, we might consider the hitherto excluded middle as a kind of undefined order, one that exceeds the logic defining either the singular terms A (for example, the designated leader), or B (for example, the followers), or, for that matter, the dialectical synthesis reconciling one and the other. In other words, A is neither B nor not-B (Widder, 2002). The ontological status of the excluded middle, its ‘essence’, is an open field of movement in which leadership is recognized as part and parcel of the vital process of continuity and not simply the juxtaposition of leaders and followers, ‘which are only arrests of our attention’ (Bergson, 1983, p. 343). Understanding leadership thus, we ought to take seriously the undefined middle sweeping singular terms away (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). This emanation of leadership is not directed toward distinguishing a state but rather toward the identification of an essential movement, in which what endures is undefined: the being-itself of difference, and not the definiteness of identity. The idea of simple, objective location has gone and the relation as a thing itself is brought to the fore. If we are to reframe our understanding of leadership significantly we must go beyond both Aristotelian ideas of positive and pure identity and Hegel’s identity of opposites. The nature of leadership must be seen as a creative process, one which exceeds the logic of identity and opposition and within which individual social actors are only syntactical conveniences; ‘technologies of representation convert[ing] the inaccessible, unknown and private into the accessible, known and public’ (Cooper, 1992, p. 267). Leadership is not located in A where it is apparent (i.e. the designated leader), nor is it simply at B from where it is being recognized (i.e. in the ‘mind’ of followers). Neither is it a series of discrete relationships between © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2005 1112 M. Wood A and B (AÆB and BÆA). It is, rather, the undefined middle, the in of the between (A´B), where both A and B are ‘inseparable moments’ (Deleuze, 1983), each necessarily referring back to the other. We are not used to this way of thinking, however. When we conceive of leadership, we do so ‘only through a mist of affective states’ (Bergson, 1983, p. 231), which we then try to combine to produce our knowledge. Because indefiniteness is traditionally thought as an absence and because, as Bergson (1974, p. 141) observes, ‘we have an eye to practice’, we always look for an immediate and complete solidification. Hence, for example, when The Economist (2003, p. 4) talks of a ‘gap between expectations and reality’ and ‘a “crisis of confidence” in corporate leadership’, it means the perception of an absence of satisfaction and an apparent lack of certainty – we look for definiteness but find indefiniteness. We always express indefiniteness as a function of definiteness; an absence of definiteness, rather than as itself: ‘it is indefinite’. This, Bergson (1983) reasons, is because indefiniteness is assumed to have no ‘It’. The assumption is there is something – ‘some things’ – in definiteness, but indefiniteness is empty, it is an absence of things; it contains ‘no things’. So, Bergson (1983, p. 334) concludes, the mind ‘swings too and fro, unable to rest’ between two, irreducible kinds of order – definiteness/ indefiniteness and presence/absence. We tend to affirm the first and shut our eyes to the second. It does not occur to us to detach ourselves from the partial expression and attend to the complete notion of in/definiteness in order to grasp this irreducibility – everything is double without being two (Deleuze, 1994). It is rather like the frame of a painting, which, although separating itself not only from the body proper of the work, but also from the wall on which the painting is hung, simultaneously connects one to the other (Derrida, 1987). PROCESSES OF BECOMING The foregoing enables an awareness of the being of becoming, within whose internal relations a concretization or occurrence appears and disappears before our eyes. What a pity received thinking on leadership has a tendency to assume concretization within an individual social actor means ‘undifferentiated sameness’ (Whitehead, 1967a, p. 133) – a definite individuality, which is, however precariously, a natural thing-in-itself, enduring here in space. But what if endurance does indicate an indefinite pattern of inter-relatedness rather than a definite identity? A tune, as distinct from a succession of detached notes, is an example of such an indefinite pattern. The individual notes make only limited sense on their own, but can make a great deal of difference when referred beyond themselves to the particular tune – even middle ‘C’ is importantly relational in this respect. We do not hear the ‘C’ simply by segregating it from the endless complex of audible notes that are ‘not C’. We hear it as a continuous flow from the ‘E’ played a moment before: the qualities of ‘E’ pervade the constitution of the ‘C’ that succeeds it. © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2005 The Fallacy of Misplaced Leadership 1113 Thus, the notes do not exist in discrete juxtaposition; rather they intermingle and penetrate one another. This displacement of individuality and simple location relates to leadership in the sense of those who are aware of themselves as centred ‘inside’ an insulated container – free from the contamination of the threatening ‘other’ which is located on the ‘outside’ – miss the subtle relations ‘in’ the ‘between’ of things. They are captured by an illusion generated by the mechanisms of ‘ego protection’ (Battersby, 1998, p. 52), safeguarding them from examination as reifications of individuating processes. These private predicates of experience no longer have to be thought as the definite individuality of strictly segregated elements, however, but as a middle, as always in the middle, virtually and paradoxically. The middle is an ‘alterindividuality’ that cannot anchor the place of an individuality defined against it. Bergson’s starting point, therefore, like Whitehead’s, is ontological. He focuses on the emergence of enduring patterns having to be seized from the original flow of process. Patterns enjoy no individuality of content, being more properly conceived as ‘succession without distinction’ (Bergson, 1921, p. 100). Bergson describes a complex relationship involving a living interpenetration connecting all ‘things’ at all places and times and which ‘adopts the very life of things’ (Bergson, 1999, p. 53). Our experience of reality manifests itself as a continual change of form, where ‘form is only a snapshot view of transition’ (Bergson, 1983, p. 302). Notwithstanding this, it would be a mistake to say there is no possibility of succession without distinction. For example, despite the linear word-space structure of phonetic writing there can hardly be a text written in which there is not some vestige of the time and labour of its writing (Derrida, 1978), or else some personal mark left by its author. This time and labour and these personal marks put thoughts and words, as well as readers and authors like you and I, into an irreducible relation, one with the other, in a way that implies we are both immanent within a primary process. Moreover, there is an additional sense in which a text is also a difference in-itself. The moment a text is written there is evidence of a selection and, therefore, of organization and this organization already implicates some previous disorganization. In other words a text’s definiteness is always in dynamic relation with an indefiniteness preceding it. Furthermore, whilst Bergson (1983) himself admits representational writing is inescapable, we can choose to write in one of two ways: first, to represent states, or, second, to represent a concern for relations, processes, and differences. In general, Bergson argues, we too easily write to represent states rather than movement. Certainly, the tendency to abstract and represent has practical utility: breaking movement up into things allows us to act, but we can seek to do this from within the moving reality. Bergson advocates writing in verbs as this calls up the ‘inner work’ of movement rather than ‘ready prepared’ states (Bergson, 1983, p. 11; cf. Bohm, 1980). Derrida (1978, p. 219) similarly suggests writing ‘theoretical fictions’ within which there can be ‘no sovereign solitude of the author’ (p. 226). Both views chime with Whitehead (1978, © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2005 1114 M. Wood p. 182), for whom ‘imaginative writing’ opens the world to our senses, precipitating endless feelings and thoughts and enabling us to bring our whole self to reading. The important point is we can still gain considerable leverage by affirming the indefiniteness of leadership and not its definiteness as an object of nature, although the shortfalls of intellectual abstraction can never be wholly avoided. The former allows the possibility of supplementing the intellect with experience (Bergson, 1983). This is valuable because the intellectual perspective of definite being finds it impossible to conceive ‘properly human experience’ (Bergson, 1991, p. 184). The intellect ‘will always settle on ‘the conceptual forms . . . it is accustomed to see’ and, therefore, ‘will always neglect the part of novelty or of creation’ (Bergson, 1983, p. 270). By adopting the rhythm of its ‘relational essence’ (Whitehead, 1967a, p. 160) we find it difficult to divorce leadership from any reference to a social context or to some communistic processes. For example, the essence of leader ‘A’ is always undefined, fluxing, it always conjointly involves an ingression with and not simply recognition by another: ‘B’. In this way the original being of leadership is properly described as a ‘systematic complex of mutual relatedness’ (Whitehead, 1967a, p. 161). These processes are leadership. That is to say the becoming of leadership is affirmed as it’s being. Leadership is a becomingness in which the fixity of ephemeral arrangements conversely comes and goes (Bergson, 1974). Accordingly, we can treat all appearances as transient abstractions as a mode of attention or symbolic fixing of this continuity of flow and not the apprehension of the distinct figures themselves. Furthermore, we might begin to ask how we might attend to the processes of creation laying behind the individual social actors we value so highly. Reaching an understanding of process and becoming not only requires a rethinking of ontological priorities, therefore, but also of our epistemological interests and methodological concerns. IMPLICATIONS FOR STUDYING LEADERSHIP Management studies typically attribute leadership processes to the personal causation of individual social actors. This is argued, increasingly, to be a conceptual mistake. The alternative analytical focus on the discrete relations of collective or distributed leadership, in which the relation remains external to the related things, is only a partial and relative solution. It, too, is a conceptual mistake. From the process-as-ontology perspective, real endurance is inter-relatedness, or difference in-itself and not discrete identity or relations of identity and difference. Process studies do not start with the hegemonic purity and certainty of individual ‘identity’. Nor do they proceed via the negative constitution of an ‘other’ against which social actors can ‘identify’ themselves. Instead, they offer a third thesis that disturbs the dogmatism of identity and folds concern for identity-politics into a hitherto excluded middle, in which identity is relational, the difference of identity itself. © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2005 The Fallacy of Misplaced Leadership 1115 Epistemological Development The epistemological problem is not to seek to understand the private world of passions, intentions and influence of individual social actors, or the discrete operation of individuation, but rather to explore the values associated with the internal movement of difference. Consider, for example, the appropriateness of the sentence ‘It is leadership’ (Bohm, 1980, p. 29). Adapting Bohm’s (1980) enquiry into the subject-verb-object structure of language, we might ask: what is the ‘It’ doing the leading? Following Bohm once more, wouldn’t it be more accurate to say ‘Leadership is going on’? Similarly, instead of saying ‘Leaders act on followers’, we can say more appropriately, ‘leadership is going on within a subtle synthesis of internal differences without mediation or relation to others’; an immanent relation making any bracketing of the abstractions customarily called ‘leaders’ and ‘followers’ difficult to sustain. With this in mind, a particular leadership figure cannot be construed as a simple element, present at hand, getting caught up in life. The figure does not ‘find itself ’ in relation to its ‘environment’, but rather the on-going ‘relation’ itself is an intrinsic feature of the figure’s being. Moreover, the figure comes to be spoken in terms of a ‘non-localizable relation sweeping up . . . two distant or contiguous points, carrying one into the proximity of the other’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 293). The ‘essence’ of leadership is not the individual social actor but a relation of almost imperceptible directions, movement and orientations, having neither beginning nor end. The original work of the biologist Lynn Margulis (Margulis and Sagan, 1986) on symbiogenesis provides a prime illustration of such perpetual movement. Evidence from the fossil record suggests evolution from the ‘primordial soup’ did not occur by separate entities competing with one another in the struggle for life, but rather through a cooperative life process. Life forms multiply and increase complexity in symbiosis with other forms, not just by killing them. The merging of organisms into new collectives involves a gradual coming together leading to physical interdependence and a permanent sharing of cells and bodies. The direct example Margulis and Sagan offer is of the intracellular organelle, the mitochondrion, whose DNA is incorporated into its mammalian successors and is now a ‘normal’ constituent of the latter’s cells, to the extent that it is hard to decide where one starts and the other stops. The phenomenon of symbiogenesis also accounts for the internal qualitative relation of people, information systems, commercial markets and so on. New technologies restructure organizational and social environments so human beings are no longer seen as separate from the rest of life. For example, the much vaunted qualities and capabilities of individual social actors are increasingly constructed, coordinated and consumed in ‘without walls’ organization. One impact of these new and ‘virtual’ modes of organizing has been to blur familiar representations © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2005 1116 M. Wood and simple location. Leaders are ‘ingested’ into self-managing teams and groups, whose organizational working practices are constituted, renegotiated and extended by advanced information and communication technologies such as e-mail and the Internet (Brigham and Corbett, 1997). Thus, symbiogenesis enables an understanding of leadership similar to process studies. Both enable a conception of leadership as a cycling through of (de)formation and (de)stabilization. This concern implies a widening of the prevalent research emphasis from its conventional insistence on the authoritative accounts of individual social actors, and toward an understanding of their identification as temporary stabilizations drawn from an internal movement of difference. Methodological Considerations A process approach to leadership is consistent with Nietzsche’s (1994) genealogical analysis as well as with ideas from critical management research, which emphasize leadership as a social field of activity (Alvesson, 1996; Alvesson and Deetz, 2000). A ‘process methodology’ applied to leadership brings three, interrelated factors to the fore. First, leadership is always enmeshed in social practice rather than in a clear-cut, definite figure. This focus brings the space of the stage or scene to the centre of analysis and not the immediate individuality of a social actor who can be simply located, or the discrete relations, which obtain between familiar representations of ‘leaders’ and ‘followers’. Second, because leadership is irreducible to simple location and subject to a myriad of ‘meanings, values, ideals and discourse processes’ (Alvesson, 1996, p. 472) we might conjecture leadership is fundamentally a process and a process is not an object, but a tending toward novelty, innovation, and emergence. In other words, a process methodology aims to study change and not things that change (Bergson, 1974; cf. Pettigrew, 1997). Third, because the enduring figures we come to recognize in a specific social context are not the inherent qualities or substantial characteristics of leadership as it really is, but an ongoing creative advance, our methodological concern should be with the identification of an essential movement, a movement that has a certain temporal dimension, a process in time. A process methodology, accordingly, is something for which temporality, activity and change are basic propositions. Now, it would be easy to assume an individual social actor could possess leadership if it were reducible to such an underlying figure. But, as we have argued, a mistake of management studies is exactly this logic of leadership as if it were ‘synonymous’ with an immediate individuality. Leadership is not an a priori empirical figure entering into relations with others but whose own sovereignty is not dependent on those relations, or on something else other than itself. For a process methodology, leadership exceeds both conceptions. We can more appropriately call it a moving synthesis of differences; a process of individuation guided by difference and creation that gives an appearance of individuality. © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2005 The Fallacy of Misplaced Leadership 1117 As such, the emergence of leadership can be productively investigated as an ‘event’ (Deleuze, 1993; Whitehead, 1967a, 1978; see also, Foucault, 1972). Exploring leadership as an event implies a certain movement and a methodological focus on relations, connexions, dependences and reciprocities, over time: a set of advantageous circumstances becoming identical with the ‘objective’ subject of leadership. In other words, through such a focus, it is difficult to maintain the simple exteriority of leadership as a clear object of study from the whole domain of institutions, economic processes, and social relations, within which an individual leader obtains. Process methodology offers a counterproposal to the neo-empiricist ‘treatment of theory and interpretation as separate from data’ (Alvesson, 1996, p. 456). Such approaches are ‘appropriate in order to get information about simple relatively fixed issues, where the meaning can be standardized and quantified’, but not ‘more complex issues . . . [such as leadership, which] cannot be translated into abstract, standardized forms and language’ (Alvesson, 1996, p. 461). Instead, process philosophy expresses an historical sense that takes a particular period, encounter, issue, or situation, rather than familiar behaviour patterns, attitudes, or traits, as its focus. Practically speaking this means attending to the withdrawn or background processes of individuation. This type of mise en scène implies the deployment of a qualitative, interpretive and ethnographic research strategy, with a strong ‘situational’ focus (Alvesson, 1996). Such an approach seeks to emphasize the degree and form of permeability of leadership and the process of its articulation. Research questions will emphasize the ambiguous and the precarious quality of leadership as a moving synthesis of differences and acknowledge the selective role of social/institutional norms and their constraints: of variations and contingencies in accounts. The focus is on leadership in an event setting, constituted less here than now and less in space than in time, so avoiding the pathological distinction leaving leaders ‘out there’. What is interesting, from a process studies perspective, is to investigate how perpetual movement and divergent processes form a discrete body, or appear to obtain in a substantial set of individual qualities and capabilities, at the same time as preserving the uninterrupted continuity of our experience. CONCLUSION: LEADERSHIP AS PROCESS Process studies provide a clear demonstration that ‘successful leaders’ are not simple, locatable social actors, nor are they the completion of an operation of individuation. An apparent individuality is construed as a selective abstraction from the vast field of experience. This selective process is prevalent because leaders tend to immerse themselves in a misleading Western ‘substance metaphysic’. They have done this by having certain ascendant characteristics ascribed: I am a visionary, I communicate well, I encourage participation, I build teams, I am clear what needs © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2005 1118 M. Wood to be achieved, and so on. The view of the individual social actor is epitomized by the prefix ‘I’ in these statements. We should not adduce any categorical distinction, however, between ‘leaders’ and their ‘environments’. When viewed in process terms, absolutely distinct individuality becomes problematic. What is primary is leadership as process, an internal qualitative relation expressing difference in-itself, without mediation or relation to external others. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) introduce the term ‘involution’ to express a relaxation of natural, obvious and reified forms and the corresponding emergence of a complex field of heterogeneous combinations and novel alliances, which cut across and beneath seemingly independent social actors. Such aggregations are a non-localizable synthesis of differences recognizing the continual participation of constituent parts within each other. The notion of leadership does not, therefore, refer specifically or exclusively to the transformational, charismatic or visionary figure of transcendent leaders, nor does it focus entirely on the behaviour of followers, or the discrete relations between one and the other, which leave the relations external to each. The emphasis on emergence and becoming rather than sheer existence or being connotes the excessive movement through which leadership frees itself from association with a ‘thing’ moving. Instead, leadership is movement, open and dynamic process, whose complete determination ‘does not follow from its possibility of becoming present. At best, it appears only in the most fleeting moments, when it does not even seem to have taken place’ (Widder, 2002, p. 59). In conclusion, management studies, as a body of knowledge and understanding, faces the pressing problem of raising the status and bringing to bear new and imaginative ways of thinking about leadership, so as to gain new conceptual leverage. Researchers, for the most part, have not drawn out the full implications of Bryman’s (1986) call for engagement with ideas from different enquiry paradigms. The current discussion has sought to extend our understanding of leadership as a creative process of becoming. The pressing methodological difficulty now is refining ways of researching the internal milieu adequate for the removal of the individual social actor as a causa sui without destroying its complexity and the leadership on which it depends. This complexity must be recognized, however, if we are to avoid the fallacy of misplaced leadership. 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