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Leadership: Who needs it?Peter Gronn aa Faculty of Education , Monash University , Building 6, Victoria,3800, AustraliaPublished online: 25 Aug 2010.

To cite this article: Peter Gronn (2003) Leadership: Who needs it?, School Leadership &Management: Formerly School Organisation, 23:3, 267-291, DOI: 10.1080/1363243032000112784

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School Leadership & Management,Vol. 23, No. 3, pp. 267–290, August 2003

Leadership: who needs it?Peter GRONNFaculty of Education, Building 6, Monash University, Victoria 3800, Australia

ABSTRACT This article provides a critique of leadership. The thrust of this critique is focusedon the discourse of leadership as a vehicle for representing organisational practice. In particular,the article identifies a series of important conceptual inadequacies, most of which are rarelyaddressed by leadership commentators. These include: difficulties in distinguishing leadershipfrom management; tensions between leadership, influence and power; the potential redundancyof leadership in the face of possible substitute factors; leader–followership’s presumption of adivision of labour; the prevailing myth of exceptionality; and disciplined subjectivity achievedthrough emergent forms of designer leadership. Embedded in each of these criticisms is the claimthat, if leadership is to retain its conceptual and practical utility, then it has to be reconstitutedin a distributed, as opposed to a focused, form. A series of suggestions as to how thistransformation might be accomplished is outlined in the final section of the article.

From Acorns to Oak Trees

For approximately the last two decades, I have been teaching, researching andwriting in the area of leadership. At the outset of this article, I would like to refer toa few aspects of what, for the most part, has turned out to be almost a career-longlove affair with leadership. Various points in this protracted odyssey touch on issueswhich I want to develop in more detail shortly.

It was during a sabbatical leave of seven delightful months in 1983–4, at whatis now the Graduate School of Education, University of Bristol, that my initialinterest in leadership developed, following which I returned to Monash to teach thesubject for the very first time. Unlike the last decade or so, in the early 1980sleadership tended not to be in vogue, so that use of terms such as ‘educationalleadership’ and ‘school leadership’ was very much more muted than is the case atpresent. Rather, educational ‘administration’ was the well-worn vocabulary withwhich my peers and myself were familiar (although occasionally the field wasreferred to as educational ‘management’). No messianic or apocalyptic leadershipepiphany occurred for me at this time, only emerging flickers followed by aquickening of interest from that point on. Thanks to the presence of a couple ofmarvellous bookshops just around the corner from my temporary abode in BerkeleySquare in Bristol, I purchased and devoured in quick succession three recentlypublished works on leadership: Burns’ (1978) Leadership, Hodgkinson’s (1983) ThePhilosophy of Leadership and Mant’s (1983) Leaders We Deserve. I also read a

ISSN 1363-2434 printed/ISSN 1364-2626 online/03/030267-24 2003 Taylor & Francis LtdDOI: 10.1080/1363243032000112784

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biography: Edinger’s (1965) Kurt Schumacher, his account of the life of a ratherintense, tempestuous, doggedly persistent and combative German Social Democratpolitician. I had no particular interest in the subject of this book. As an example ofmy professional reading, however, the choice of Edinger is instructive, for at thattime I was nurturing a recently acquired interest in biography, and Edinger was ahighly reputable psycho-biographer. Indeed, part of my reason for going to England(as I would again in 1988) was to gather archival and interview data for a biographi-cal project of my own on the life of J. R. Darling, an English-born Australian schoolhead.

The particular stimulus for my nascent biographical interest had been AlanFraser Davies who, until his sudden and untimely death in 1987, was Professor ofPolitics at the University of Melbourne. It was Davies’ (1980) magisterial workSkills, Outlooks and Passions on which I relied to frame my understanding ofleadership. Davies was an exceptionally kind man who gave generously of his timeto, and was highly supportive of, young scholars. He had a highly creative andstimulating mind. Such was the infectiousness of his enthusiasm for understandingthe role of personality in leadership that, despite what I am about to say shortly byway of critique of the contemporary field, under the aegis of Davies and hiscolleague, Graham Little, a distinctive psycho-social approach to social and institu-tional analysis prospered for a decade or more in Melbourne. Davies and Little werepart of a burgeoning international diaspora of scholars building connections betweenthe fields of psychology, political science and sociology. The broad local cross-disciplinary network of academics, graduate students, psychologists and psycho-analysts informally headed up by Davies was known as the Melbourne psycho-socialgroup. His particular passion was political psychology, and this found expression ina long-standing interest in the deeds and motivations of political leaders, civil servicemandarins and other public notables. Davies saw his academic mission as communi-cating an understanding of what made such people ‘tick’. The psycho-social groupconvened regular seminars and colloquia, and it was thanks to Davies that I retaineda loose affiliation with it. For some reason, as an undergraduate student in politicalscience at Melbourne, I had not encountered Davies as a teacher, but we had madecontact and discovered mutual interests in the early 1980s. At this time I was dimlyaware that there existed an extensive heritage of research literature on leadership, thebulk of the findings of which was dominated by behavioural psychology (and whichwas mostly dismissed by the people whose work I was becoming familiar with asdreary, dull, unremarkable and badly in need of a makeover). But the highlystimulating developments on the fringes of political science, for which Davies hadbeen one of the prime movers, was where the real action was to be found.

Such, in essence, was the broad formative milieu in which my nascent under-standing of leadership began to gestate. It is fair to say that, from this time until theearly 1990s, I took leadership pretty much at face value. That is, leaders wereself-evidently leaders. There was no conceptual mystery about leadership andleaders, be they in schools, school systems, universities or the political process, for‘leader’ was simply the label by which they were known. The scholarly challenge towhich I became committed, therefore, was to try to communicate such leaders’

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views of the world and the impact of those views; to seek to ascertain the uniquecircumstances of their biographical formation which resulted in their adherence tothese views; to interpret their actions as leaders; and, finally, to provide a causal(albeit psycho-biographical) explanation for those actions. This agenda was largelyconsistent with the spirit of Davies’ project in Skills, Outlooks and Passions and,clearly, it still retains its scholarly and practical significance. The realisation thatdawned on me, however, was that these matters comprised only part of theexplanatory picture, rather than the whole of it. As I read and delved, it becameincreasingly evident that a significant amount of the field’s understanding of leader-ship is grounded in highly dubious and problematic assumptions. The purpose ofthis article, therefore, is to address some of these issues, a number of which I havebeen wrestling with in recent and forthcoming manuscripts. Such is the depth of myreservations that the questions I am asking should cause us to consider whether anyjustification remains for the continuation of leadership as a scholarly field. Hence mytitle, ‘Leadership: who needs it?’.

There are six matters of particular concern. These, briefly, are: first, therelationship between leadership and management; second, the connection betweenleadership and power; third, whether there are explanatory substitutes for leader-ship; fourth, the typical assumptions we make about the division of leadershiplabour; fifth, the problems generated by the prevailing cult of leader ‘exceptionality’;and sixth, the consequences, intended and unintended, of the recent emergence ofleadership design prototypes, an intimation, perhaps, of a new Foucauldian-styledisciplinary regime. After developing each of these six points, I offer some sugges-tions about possible future directions for leadership.

Leading or Managing? [1]

The first concern is one of definition or, better still, distinction. I began bysuggesting that, two decades or so ago, terms such as ‘management’ and ‘adminis-tration’ had as much currency as, if not more than, ‘leadership’ in educationalcircles. Had I the time and space, this claim could be substantiated by a historicalreview of course names, journal titles, departmental labels and the like from thisperiod. All of that, as should be self-evident, has recently changed. There is now avast leadership industry out there of truly staggering proportions (in which govern-ments, corporations, academics, schools and school systems have a huge materialvested interest), such that the discourse of ‘leadership’ has become ubiquitous. Thisdiscourse is evident in course and subject retitling. It has been evidenced by themushrooming growth of leadership centres. It is to be found increasingly in thewording of advertisements for job vacancies. It is also manifest in an enormous bodyof conceptual and research literature. These examples could readily be multiplied.

What do these developments mean? Shortly, I shall try to show how, in themid-1980s, as part of leadership exceptionalism, commentators began to canoniseleadership and to demonise management. For the moment, however, a key questionis: what changes, if anything, when commentators begin to privilege words such as‘leader’, ‘leading’ and ‘leadership’ as discursive modes of representing reality,

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instead of previously favoured terminology such as ‘manager’, ‘management’, etc?To illustrate part of the problem arising out of distinctions between leadership andmanagement, I now cite an extended extract of interview dialogue from some recentresearch [2]. Here, a first-time leading teacher in an Australian secondary school isoutlining for me the nuts and bolts of his newly assumed role responsibilities [3]. Atthe time of the interview (December 2001), LT#4, as I refer to him, was 35 and, asa mature-age entrant to teaching, he had spent six years as a mathematics andscience teacher. Previously, LT#4 had worked as a surveyor. The Years 7–12secondary college in which he had been teaching for three years had an enrolmentof about 1800, and employed 120 teachers and approximately 30 auxiliary staff. Byany standards, then, this was what, in the terminology of traditional organisationtheory, would have been known as a ‘complex organisation’. The questions I nowwant to ask about these extracts are: How should we characterise what they say? Iswhat is disclosed evidence of leadership, or is it management (or, possibly, some-thing else)? Why leadership or why management? What are the criteria, if any, fordeciding whether it is one or the other? And, finally, does it really matter which wayit is characterised?

1. GRONN: Did you have particular expectations of yourself when you took thejob [of leading teacher] on?

2. LT#4: Yeah, I had the expect, well I had a certain, I had positive goals that Ihad to achieve during the year, which obviously are get the timetable up andrunning, and initiate any changes in staffing and conditions, and things like that, andchanges, implement changes in the curriculum. So I’m, there’s not, there’s a fewthings: I wanted to do the job better, I suppose, which were some of the aims to cutit, to try and decrease the workload at the end of the year, and I’ve sort of workedat that. But a lot of the job is implementing the changes in the school and so I’m sortof in the tail-end of those changes a little bit, so that the curriculum committeemight come up with a change: as an example in, they want, next year they want Year8 students to do the majority of their subjects as a home, as a form group or a homegroup, which is different to everything we’ve done in the past, so I’ve had toimplement that change so, and they always seek my advice, they say: ‘Can it bedone?’, and you say: ‘Yeah, it can be done, but there’ll be consequences. These area couple but there will also be some I don’t know’.

3. GRONN: I guess you and the daily organiser are the two critical people, really,in making the, ensuring that the system, sort of, you know, moves on appropriately,isn’t it, really?

4. LT#4: Yeah. So, you know, day one next year there’s got to be, there’s 1800kids arrive at the door, and you’ve got to make sure that there’s rooms and classesand teachers for everyone.

5. GRONN: The daily organiser has got to make sure they’re all staffed andcovered, and what, you have, and you’ve got to make sure they’re all mapped andclear?

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6. LT#4: Yeah.

Timetabling goes to the heart of the arranging of pedagogical practice for teachersand students. In the duality of structure and agency (Archer 1995), LT#4 and hiscolleagues are negotiating structure. As utterance 2 reveals, LT#4 is constrained bycolleagues’ initiatives, and, as utterance 4 shows, his latitude for discretion is alsovery strongly circumscribed by time-bound imperatives. In this sense, LT#4’sagency is reactive rather than proactive. Indeed, as he notes later on, in utterance 24,there is very little scope for proactivity in school timetabling.

7. GRONN: Okay, well what about the expectations of your colleagues: did youhave a sense of what they were, you know what they were expecting of you?

8. LT#4: I work quite closely with the principal because he’s the one who’salways, you know, staff coming and going, he wants to know how many staff weneed. So, his expectations are that he gets as much inform, feedback from me aboutstaffing as early as possible so that he can start changing, so… so, he wants to knowas early as possible what staff he’ll need so I have to go through and to work out howmany periods of art and technology and PE and science and all that sort of thing,and compare it to staff we’ve got and say: ‘Well, we’re going to have more phys edclasses next year but less food tech’, or something. So, he’s got to know, he’s got tostart thinking about that change when he appoints people or puts jobs up.

Other significant constraints, as is evident in utterance 8, are the expectations andneeds of his principal. Interestingly, however, the principal is dependent on andconstrained in his own actions by the information provided by LT#4. Fore-shadowing a later point about distributed work practices, then, utterance 8 is a goodillustration of the interdependence of two role incumbents and of their mutual needto coordinate. One further significant constraint on LT#4, as is evident below inutterance 14, is the school’s inability to be able to finalise its staffing establishmentuntil early in the new school year.

9. GRONN: Do you enjoy doing the role?

10. LT#4: Sometimes it’s a lot of hard work, but there is a certain amount ofsatisfaction getting, at the start of the year when everything works, or you hope thateverything works. You don’t get too many thanks from the staff members, they, theysort of come and complain when things aren’t going their way but, you, they expectit all to work properly and they’ve got their classes in the rooms that they want, andso you usually only hear the complaints rather than anything positive, but, but Iwould now take the fact that if, the less people come and complain the better it is.

11. GRONN: So, to have it all in place when the gong goes at the start of dayone … to have it all in place and ready to go, ready to rock and roll, how much work,I mean what, what does it entail for you to do that, I mean you are obviouslyworking on it now, I suppose?

12. LT#4: Yeah, well at the moment I’m working on it full time for the next, thenext two weeks, and I’ve been fairly flat chat [i.e. very busy] since about October.

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13. GRONN: Is that right?

14. LT#4: Yeah, I’ve been planning. You know, before that, like the term breakwe had five staff turn over, so that was sort of, change in itself, but basically this termis fairly heavy going, but I still won’t be able to get it finished before the end of theyear because we won’t have our staffing finalised. Like today, I found out thatanother staff member is leaving, so we won’t have all our staff till January, so I willbe here for the last couple of weeks of the holidays.

15. GRONN: So, I mean you, you won’t have firm, when do you get firm Year 7enrolment numbers?

16. LT#4: They are very accurate quite early. The junior school coordinator andthe Year 7 teachers go out and they do a, visit the local primary schools and they,all the grade 6 kids have to put their applications in and they are all processed by sortof, early October I suppose.

17. GRONN: Right, yeah, well that’s okay then.

18. LT#4: So you, those numbers might increase by.

19. GRONN: Your numbers are fairly, so it’s really the staffing variable that’s theunknown, isn’t it?

20. LT#4: Yeah, and we can model how much, what the retention rate is fromyear to year, so we roughly know that if we’ve got 300, say 300 Year 10s, we knowthat we’ll have about 78% of those next year. So we, going on previous retentionrates we can plan for those.

The dialogue in utterances 9–20 highlights the unromantic nature of the unremittinghard grind endeavour associated with LT#4’s role. This is the stuff of ‘smallpictures’, with the devil in the detail, rather than of mesmerising, broad brush, ‘bigpicture’ visions extolled as the hallmark of late-twentieth-century leaders (e.g.Bennis & Nanus 1985). Yet the work consumes LT#4’s time and energies, and asatisfactorily smooth start to the succeeding school year depends on months of hisand others’ hard labour, for, as he says in utterance 22, ‘you’ve got to get it right’.Yet, despite his limited scope for proactive agency, LT#4 indicates (in utterances24, 26 and 28) that he is predisposed to introducing new procedures.

21. GRONN: It sounds like a learned science …

22. LT#4: We, we just don’t have the flexibility of staff. Everyone has to beteaching their allotted classes within one or two, but you just don’t have anyflexibility at all, yeah, so you’ve got to make, you’ve got to get it right.

23. GRONN: So, have the expectations you had, have they been confirmed foryou now that you’ve been at it for 12 months?

24. LT#4: Yeah, because I’d done the job a little bit before for six months whilethe previous timetabler was overseas, it gave me a taste for it and I basically knewwhat the expectations were when I took the job on. It seems to have got harder

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rather than easier this year because of other factors out of, out of my control. There’sbeen quite a few curriculum changes and there’s been staff changes and that’s, thatsort of things, but you’ve got to go with the flow a bit, I suppose, you, it’s very mucha, you know you got to, you can’t be proactive, you can’t sort of plan for changes,you’ve just got to make sure what changes there are that you can implement.

25. GRONN: So you are reacting in a way, aren’t you, I suppose, rather than sortof, so have you been able to bring something new to the job, do you think?

26. LT#4: Well, being my first year I thought I would take it on, and there’s acouple of things, I want to make the job easier, like I felt we repeated a lot ofprocedures last year and a lot of the information I put out I didn’t think wasrequired, so I’ve sort of, it’s just basically information sheets that I have producedabout what staff there are in faculty and all that sort of stuff, and what classes they’vegot, and I’ve just used, I’ve condensed that so I don’t have to keep repeating a lotof information.

27. GRONN: Refined a few things?

28. LT#4: Yeah, to make the job easier and, I think that’s, that’s my aim next yearis to make that go further and try and work out how, make the job more efficient andI, I think I’ll have to have a chat to a couple of the IT guys to design a couple ofExcel programs to make it a bit easier.

29. GRONN: So, has CASES [4] been helping?

30. LT#4: CASES is a good tool, but because it’s fairly new there are still bugs init … and it’s still just a tool, there’s a lot of forward planning that it doesn’t take intoaccount.

31. GRONN: Right, so that’s why you have to do these extra spreadsheets?

32. LT#4: Yeah, yeah.

This five minutes or so of dialogue raises some important issues concerned withthe validity, utility and worth of binary or dualistic distinctions. At face value,because LT#4’s description of the work associated with his role appears to bemainly concerned with the resourcing of the school, rather than with its spiritual oremotional well-being, then for commentators such as Bennis and Nanus (1985) thatis sufficient to define LT#4 as a manager rather than a leader. But how meaningfulis such a resource/emotion divide, for delivery of the kind of outcome to whichLT#4 is committed (i.e. getting ‘it’ right) would no doubt be seen by manycolleagues as a necessary precondition of their emotional well-being anyway (asLT#4 himself implies in utterance 10 with: ‘they all expect it to work properly …’)?Moreover, according to what rationale does a focus on resource procurement countonly as management rather than leadership? Viewed from the perspective of attri-bution theory (Calder 1977), such arbitrary adamantine distinctions make littlesense, for the question of LT#4’s status as a manager or leader depends entirely onthe qualities colleagues ascribe to him on the basis of an alignment between their

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perceptions of him and their prior cognitive prototypes of organisational roles.Leadership is in the eye of the beholder. Some commentators have even queriedwhether anything is gained by differentiating leaders and managers. Nicholls (2002),for example, proposes that formal position-holders are employed as managers andthat members of this cadre who manifest the behaviour typically associated withleadership need simply to be thought of as more high profile managers than theirpeers. ‘Creating an effective organisation that is viable in the long-term requiresmanagers with extraordinary talent’, such as LT#4, ‘but why refer to these talentedmanagers as leaders’, asks Nicholls (2002: 15)? Finally, to foreshadow a point madelater on, to define the apparently mundane and inglorious detail of LT#4’stimetabling work as management, but not leadership, is to risk residualising activitywhich, on any test of significance, is basic to the well-being, vitality and productivityof schools.

Leadership, Influence or Power?

Turning to the second area of concern, leadership is part of a family of terms ofclosely related usage, a number of which overlap in meaning, thereby suggestingpossible redundancy. These terms are used to distinguish different modes of humanconduct and engagement. Apart from leadership, the other members of this familyor grouping are: authority, power, influence, persuasion, manipulation, coercion andforce. Now, within this discursive family, leadership is the favourite and mostprominent offspring, in both education and beyond. None of its siblings, it seems tome, have ever really commanded anything like the reverence and respect with whichleadership has been adorned. To my way of thinking, however, this hallowed statusis rather puzzling, for while leadership shares some of the defining attributes of itsfamily members, it alone gets singled out for special treatment.

How might the relations between these family members be illustrated? Unfortu-nately, there is no ideal schematic arrangement for doing so. If we take a continuum,for example, it is difficult to conceive of these terms as located along a hypotheticalline. Such an apparatus presupposes a set of relationships partitioned between twoend-points or extremities, in which case one has to ask: extremes of what, and whatabout the spaces between the concepts? Should these be equidistant or uneven andirregular? In his classic discussion of power, Lukes (1974) inserted this family ofterms into an L-shaped conceptual space as a means of illustrating their overlap andinterconnection. Interestingly, Lukes excluded leadership from his arrangementwhile including inducement and encouragement. Rather than reviewing the meritsof alternative diagrammatic arrangements, such as grids, matrices, cubes or (asemployed by Davies to good effect in Skills, Outlooks and Passions) spheres, I shallbegin slightly arbitrarily with power which, along with influence, at least in regard tousage and meaning, is the closest family relative to leadership.

During the years immediately preceding the emergence of my interest inleadership that I outlined earlier, power had been the main focus of my research. Formy doctoral thesis, for example, I drew extensively on a burgeoning political scienceliterature in which theorists of elitism and pluralism debated the merits of their

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respective conceptual and methodological approaches to power analysis. To thebest of my knowledge, little of this discourse penetrated the field of leadership,and leadership also rarely found its way into these debates. In short, there weretwo parallel intellectual conversations occurring. Sadly, for the most part there stillare.

Consider the discourse of power. It is not uncommon to hear power broachedin the following ways: power structure, concentrations of power, powerful persons,empowerment, power elites or pluralities of power and, interestingly, the distri-bution of power. Unlike leadership, it is standard practice for political scientists toresearch patterns of power distribution in political and social systems. Taking as anillustration Dahl’s (1975) Who Governs?, a classic account of power in a US city,Dahl (1975: 90) described his focus as ‘the distribution of influence’ in his casestudy community. While the expression ‘distributed leadership’ does not appear inDahl’s text, his investigation provides what is, in effect, an account of the distri-bution of leadership, in the sense that community influence was dispersed amongsta number of influential groups, rather than concentrated in one small elite and, fromtime to time, was expressed directly and indirectly by elite and sub-elite powergroups across a range of community-wide issues. But what about the leadership oforganisations: are there not similar patterns of organisational leadership correspond-ing to the dispersal of power and influence across a society? I shall return to thisquestion shortly. The final observation to make about power and the remainingfamily siblings is that one other feature of usage differentiates them from leadership:none of them generate binary categories. The closest approximation to a dualism is‘powerful’ and ‘powerless’, which is nowhere near as entrenched in popular con-sciousness as ‘leader’ and ‘follower’. A question that needs to be asked, then, is: whydoes the discourse of leadership differ in this respect?

If power is considered in relation to authority, there is some similarity orequivalence of usage. That is, as with power, it is common to refer to suchphenomena as authority structures, authority figures or authoritative persons. Onthe other hand, authority and power are not equivalent phenomena, for authority,unlike power, provides a constitutive basis for legitimating human conduct. That is,authority establishes an order for action derived from a legal foundation or similarframework of legitimacy (Coleman 1990). In this sense, authority is a definingattribute of management, although not leadership, for management is grounded inan employment contract, a legally binding document that defines an employee’sduties, responsibilities and accountabilities. An employment contract establishes adivision of rights (as opposed to a division of labour) in respect of work allocation.This contractual arrangement, for example, is the basis of LT#4’s authority as amanager with the title of ‘leading teacher’. By convention, this division of authorityis vertical and known as a hierarchy. A hierarchy is a device for arranging levels orgrades of authority from a minimum, at the base, to a maximum or superordinatelevel, at the top. In accordance with the principle of subsumption, the authority ofincumbents at each succeeding level may substitute for and override those beneaththem. A system of hierarchically arranged responsibilities is often known as anexecutive system or (figuratively) as a chain of command. In the absence of

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organisational hierarchy, there would be parity (or equality) of authority. But, whyhierarchy? There are a number of reasons, both cultural and historical, for itsadoption, including traditionally inherited notions of ‘chiefdom’, the recognitionthat there are different levels of human competence, and an acknowledgement thatnot all organisational work is of equal worth or value. The critical point about ahierarchy is that the higher the level, the greater the amount of authority and weightof responsibility borne by role incumbents.

Authority, then, differs from power in that it is concerned with the governanceof conduct through such vehicles as legislative frameworks, regulations, rules,conventions, etc. Slightly confusingly, perhaps, an authority structure also confers‘powers’ on office-holders, such as legislators or members of the judiciary. Likeleadership, managerial authority has spawned it own binary: ‘superior’ (or, strictlyspeaking, ‘superordinate’) and ‘subordinate’. This shorthand, which has wide cur-rency, refers, ostensibly, to persons to whom a role incumbent might be answerableor over whom one exercises authority or command. Due to its inherent vagueness,however, such terminology is unhelpful (for it does not designate particular hier-archical positions or job titles). Moreover, the earlier problem of distinguishingleadership from management is compounded by such indiscriminate labelling whensome commentators (e.g. Dansereau et al. 1995: 415, 418) employ ‘leader’ and‘superior’, and ‘follower’ and ‘subordinate’ interchangeably.

During the radical critique of behaviourist and liberal social theory during the1970s and early 1980s, disputes about power oscillated between claim and counter-claim that it was a capacity or attribute of persons, or was evident in relationshipsbetween persons and the social structures that framed their actions. In the thirtyyears’ war (or thereabouts) between the paradigms, the relational view has prevailed.But this was not so in the case of leadership where, until recently, a mostlyunder-determined agency view of leadership has held sway (Hunt & Dodge 2001).An under-determined perspective on agency is dismissive of the constraints onindividual or collective actions, while simultaneously exaggerating the capacities,possibilities and opportunities for attaining preferred outcomes. On the other hand,leadership has this much in common with power: while power has become a termof critique over the last two to three decades or so (thanks, initially, to Lukes and,latterly, to Foucault), leadership is usually associated with the targets of thatcritique: the powerful, whose actions are legitimated by authority.

Turning specifically to leadership, the Shorter Oxford Dictionary devotes almostan entire three-column page of definitions and etymological detail to ‘lead’ and itsvarious derivatives: ‘leader’, ‘leading’, etc. To ‘follow the leader’, for example, is saidto date from 1863, and ‘to give a lead’, as when the front rider in a hunt leaps afence, originated in 1859. The point of these and the numerous other examples citedin the dictionary is that they illustrate precisely Calder’s (1977) point that leadershipis a lay, everyday knowledge term, and not a scientific construct. Precisely whenwords such as leader, follower, leadership and followership became part of commonusage is difficult to know. On the other hand, the uptake of such terms within thescholarly community, which have become veneered as ‘science’ (Calder 1977),increased dramatically during the twentieth century. There is, however, a peculiar

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discursive feature of leadership, for in its relations with its fellow family members itis unable to stand on its own feet. That is, it has always needed a fellow sibling,‘influence’, to support it, so that when commentators define leadership, almostinvariably they invoke influence, although Burns (1978: 12, 19), for whom leader-ship is ‘a special form of power’, while influence is ‘an unnecessary and unparsimo-nious’ concept, is a notable exception. Typical of those who see an affinity betweenleadership and influence is Rost (1993: 102, italicised original) who, in his exhaus-tive conceptual review, defines leadership as ‘an influence relationship amongleaders and followers who intend real changes that reflect their mutual purposes’.But this definition begs some questions: if leadership is a type, or aspect, ofinfluence, doesn’t that make ‘leadership’ unnecessary? That is, if it is influence weare really talking about, then why not stay with that word? Why do commentatorsfeel the need to grace the influential conduct they have in mind with the status ofleadership? In short, when describing and analysing the flow of collective action andthe conduct of persons as part of that process, why is it leadership we are talkingabout rather than influence or power?

Revisiting Substitutes for Leaders and Leadership

The third issue about leadership concerns its privileged explanatory status. Whenthey criticised leadership theories in the late 1970s, particularly cross-sectionalstatistically designed studies, for their inability to account for significant amounts ofcriterion variance, Kerr and Jermier (1978) were not only challenging that status,but they were raising the possibility of more powerful alternative or substituteexplanations for actions and event outcomes. Evidence of the field’s resistance totheir critique may partly have accounted for their initial difficulties in securing apublication outlet. Two decades later, in a Leadership Quarterly symposium on theirsubstitutes article (now touted as a classic in the field), Jermier and Kerr (1997)remained disappointed at the lack of uptake of their original proposal.

What Kerr and Jermier (1978) had done, in effect, was to canvass the potentialredundancy of leadership. There were occasions, they claimed, when the leadershipof an individual could be nullified, substituted for or rendered irrelevant. They hadsuggested, for example, that because there was a range of possible explanatoryfactors in accounting for workplace behaviour (including individual predispositions,the inherent nature of tasks, workplace processes and relations with supervisors),researchers were faced with ‘a taxonomy of situations where we should not bestudying “leadership” (in the formal hierarchical sense) at all’ (Kerr & Jermier 1978:377). Thus, feedback from peers or clients, or an employee’s self-motivation, couldsubstitute for the (direct or indirect) influence of a formally designated leader. InLT#4’s case, for example, utterances 10, 24, 26 and 28 provide strong evidence ofself-generated enthusiasm and ability to learn from experience, so that no-one hadto drive him. Kerr and Jermier (1978) also thought leadership was unnecessarywhen the work tasks were routine, well-rehearsed, unambiguous and learned byheart. In fact, in a series of experiments, they suggested that in 12 of 24 positedoccasions characteristics inherent in a task (e.g. its intrinsically satisfying nature) or

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an employee (e.g. her or his abilities) could substitute for both task-oriented orrelationship-oriented leader behaviour. One implication of this claim was that otherinfluences on task performance replaced face-to-face interaction with leaders.Another was that leaders influenced employees more indirectly through a variety ofprocesses ‘by making decisions that minimise[d] the need for the face-to-faceexercise of power’ (Jermier & Kerr 1997: 99). While such findings narrowedsignificantly the scope of, and need for, direct leader influence, they also compli-cated the identification of its locus and form.

If this argument is valid, then the possibility of substitute effects should prompta reconsideration of work practice research. Leadership, per the agency of individualleaders, tends to be positioned at the front or input end of the explanatory templatenormally used to account for the flow of action. With remarkably few exceptions,leaders are conventionally constructed as causal agents of work outcomes. Analternative perspective on the role of leadership, however, might be to begin theanalysis and explanation at the opposite, rear or back end. That is, a differentapproach would be to begin the analysis of work practice or the outcomes to beaccounted for and then to comb back through the universe of explanatory possibil-ities, of which leadership may (or may not) turn out to be just one. From thisperspective, two alternative questions are likely to provide a more accurate androbust understanding of the place of leadership within the universe of candidatecausal explanations: For any period of time under review or consideration, what isthe totality of the work that is to be performed by an organisation (e.g. department,school or university)? And, within that time frame, what is required as part of thatorganisation’s totality of work practices, to accomplish that body of work?

Dividing the Leadership Labour

The fourth item of concern is the leader–follower binary alluded to earlier. Such isthe strength of the presumed symbiosis between these two analytical constructs thatthey are like the horse and carriage in the song about marriage: i.e. there cannot beone without the other. But why not? Why, for example, do commentators assumethat organisation members must be slotted into either of these binary categories?To claim, as is often said, that there can be no leaders without followers, is to tryto naturalise, a priori, a division of labour. In this case, however, to naturalise anaspect of reality by dichotomising its representation is to presuppose what needs tobe demonstrated. That is, if leadership is a form of influence, as was highlightedearlier, then a construction such as ‘leader’–’followers’ seems to imply that oneperson monopolises all the influence while all of the residualised non-leaders aresupine.

This binary creates a number of difficulties, some of which have been con-sidered elsewhere (see Gronn 1999, especially 2–19). Here, I want to emphasise thepoint that, in any organisation there is rarely ever just one leader and a number offollowers, and that these designations are unlikely to apply to the same persons infixed perpetuity. As Gibb (1958), originator of the term ‘distributed leadership’,acknowledged, the grounds on which external observers apportion organisation

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members to either category are entirely arbitrary. As an illustration of how ‘leader’–‘follower’ constructs a misleading description of reality, consider the followingpassages from Follett’s (1973: 120–121) essay ‘The illusion of final authority’, where(in 1926) she discusses delegation:

In a large bank, a separate man [sic] has the responsibility for new business,exchange, deposits, credit loans, and so on. But the separation of functiondoes not mean the delegation of authority. The unfortunate thing inwriting on business organization is that our language has not caught upwith our actual practice. As distribution of function has superseded hier-archy of position in many plants, delegation of authority should be anobsolete expression, yet we hear it every day.

Although Follett’s focus here is not leadership, per se, she recognises, nevertheless,that unless analytical terminology reflects current practice, it imposes an outmodeddiscursive template on reality which, as with ‘leader’–’followers’, I suggest, obscuresthe actual division of workplace labour. In contrast with over-simplified binaries anddualisms, the reality of the operation of executive functions, as articulated in thisnext segment, is that they are distributed processes in which a number of personscoordinate their joint endeavours to accomplish work:

I say that authority should go with function, but as the essence of organiza-tion is the interweaving of functions, authority we now see as a matter ofinterweaving. An order, a command, is a step in a process, a moment in themovement of interweaving experience, and we should guard against think-ing this step a larger part of the whole process than it really is. There is allthat leads to the order, all that comes afterwards—methods of administra-tion, the watching and recording of results, what flows out of it to makefurther orders. If we trace all that leads to a command, what persons areconnected with it, and in what way, we find that more than one man’sexperience has gone to the making of that moment—unless it is a matter ofpurely arbitrary authority. Arbitrary authority is authority not related to allthe experience concerned, but to that of one man alone, or one group ofmen.

For Follett, then, there is little justification for singling out individuals (such aspresumed ‘leaders’) for special status:

The particular person identified then with the moment of command—foreman, upper executive or whoever it may be—is not the most importantmatter for our consideration, although of course a very important part ofthe process. All that I want to emphasize is that there is a process. Apolitical scientist writes, ‘Authority co-ordinates the experience of man,’but I think this is a wrong view of authority. The form of organizationshould be such as to allow or induce the continuous co-ordination of theexperience of men. Legitimate authority flows from co-ordination, notco-ordination from authority.

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An increasing number of commentators are dissatisfied with or are disavowingthe leader–follower binary (see Gronn 2002a). In light of this development, thepoint about Follett’s example is that, although written more than 70 years ago, itresonates with recent analyses by sociologists of work practices across a range ofoccupations, particularly in the area known as ‘the visibilisation of work’, that haveimportant implications for leadership. ‘Visibilisation’ refers to the de-reifying ofabstract terminology that masks or glosses the processes and properties of real worldphenomena. Such abstractions ‘temper the clutter of the visible by creating invisi-bles’, remarks Star (1991: 265), for they ‘stand quietly, cleanly, and docilely for thenoisome, messy actions and materials’. The attribute of ‘greatness’, which, untilStogdill’s critique of ‘trait theory’ in the late 1940s (Bass 1990: 59–77), had widecurrency in the field of leadership, is a good illustration. Shapin (1989) has shownhow, in the case of the English gentleman chemist, Robert Boyle, after whomBoyle’s Law of Gases is named, the myth of a so-called ‘great’ scientist was erectedon the foundation of the (historically invisible) division of labour and moraleconomy of the seventeenth-century scientific laboratory. At the rear of his house inPall Mall, London, stood Boyle’s scientific laboratory. A number of support person-nel (all males) were employed there. They were known as ‘chemical servants’, butthe exact identity and number Boyle employed at any one time is difficult toascertain. This is because, in Boyle’s account of his laboratory and in the historio-graphy of laboratory science, they are mostly absent. This invisibilising of distributedlaboratory work practice intrigued Shapin (1989: 557) who discovered that ‘a verysubstantial proportion of Boyle’s experimental work was done through prolongedexperimentation and very hard labour on his behalf by paid assistants’. In fact, Boylewas doubly dependent on the judgements of the hands and eyes of these peoplebecause both his eyesight and his health were poor. Collective endeavour, then,became masked by an individualistic bias in western historiography towards the‘solitary individual in contact with reality or with sources of inspiration’ (Shapin1989: 561).

Mindful in my own case of what I referred to at the outset of this paper as theacuity of A. F. Davies’ mental apparatus, in the genealogy of science, young Turkscientists, and scholars generally, are socialised to position themselves as the disci-ples of a so-called ‘great mind’. As with the attribution of ‘followership’ in organisa-tions generally, as part of the ‘leader’–’followers’ binary, however, the assimilation ofsuch a self-imposed workplace status is part and parcel of the identity politics of theacademy. On the other hand, the reality of laboratory life, notes Mukerji (1998:275), defies such categorisation:

Laboratory discussions caught in transcripts simply do not show infor-mation passing up a chain of command, and analytical insight passingdown along the same chain. The system is much more complex, and muchmore a distributed system of learning, where different technical skills andanalytic abilities are arrayed around a joint project. Distributed cognition ismasked behind a system of social performance, developed to reinforce thesocial power of science by giving to groups the problems that individuals

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could not solve on their own, and attributing the solution to select individ-uals.

Students of work practices and organisational processes require a lexicon with whichto designate agents and their conduct, but which does not institutionalise myth-ology. The problem is to find accurate means of differentiating between contribu-tions (for not all acts are of a piece) and modes of acting within a workforce whileseeking to account for action and, with the lessons of 1970s debate over power, inmind, inaction. While the available options include such tried and true modes ofdistinction as experience, function, occupational title, rank, status, level of responsi-bility, etc., one possible alternative to the conventional discourse of ‘leadership’ maybe the emerging literature on ‘communities of practice’ (Gronn 2003a).

Exceptionality

Despite these strictures concerning ‘greatness’, the dominant contemporary concep-tion of leadership remains the doctrine of ‘exceptionalism’. Exceptionalism re-emerged in the two decades that form the backdrop to this discussion, during whichcommand-and-control line managerialism was supplanted by rhetorics of integrationand control achieved through the management of culture. ‘Re-emerged’ because,notwithstanding both Stogdill’s initial (up until 1947) and subsequent (1948–1970)critique of trait theory (Bass 1990), leadership personality factors, in the form ofclusters of traits, unlike the previously atomised traits dismissed by Stogdill, areasserted by neo-trait theorists to account for statistically significant proportions ofvariance in behaviour. Bass (1998: 120), a leading neo-trait theorist, claims that‘both improved conceptualization and improved methodology stimulated the returnof the trait approach to the study of leadership in the 1990s’.

Exceptionalism assumes that leadership is the monopoly of individual roleincumbents or, at best, a handful of strategically positioned actors in organisations.This doctrine is legitimated by the earlier normative discursive dualism of leadershipand management which constructs leaders as visionary, charismatic or transforma-tional champions who, unlike mere managers (or followers), add value to organisa-tions. Leadership that is exceptional is presumed to be manifest behaviourally inindividual deeds of heroic proportions, as is evident in the popular discourse oftransformation in which states of so-called organisational turn-around, revitalisationand performative excellence are attributed causally to the deeds of high-profile,larger-than-life figures. Exceptional leadership, then, is individually ‘focused’ leader-ship and in this sense is the antithesis of distributed leadership. The popularity offocused exceptionalism stems from its attraction as a presumed solution to theproblem of motivating and mobilising a workforce, with a view to securing enhancedlevels of employee output and productivity in a competitive global economy. Itsstatus is also fuelled by a wider culture of narcissism and romanticism in whichcontrol by so-called ‘ordinary functionaries’ has proven incapable of fulfilling popu-lar fantasies of organisational leadership (Gabriel 1997).

Despite its seductive appeal, exceptionalism rests on a false assumption. As was

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suggested earlier, while they canonise individualist leadership, the proponents ofexceptional leadership downplay or demonise management. Typical here is Bennisand Nanus’ (1985: 21, original italicised) notorious dismissal of managers as ‘peoplewho do things right’ compared with leaders who ‘do the right thing’. But thiscontrast between ‘things right’ and ‘the right thing’ is both epistemologically andempirically unsound. Epistemologically, it is an attempt to resurrect the traditionaldistinction between facts and values [5]. Thus, ‘things right’ reduces to competenceor technical mastery, whereas ‘the right thing’ implies desirable ends, purposes orvalues. Yet, LT#4’s case highlights the falsity of this reasoning. In the dialoguebetween utterances 1 and 25, LT#4 exemplifies his capacity to fulfil the complexi-ties of his timetabling responsibilities. From utterance 26 on, however, he indicatesthat timetabling is not merely a technical matter for, on the ground of efficiency,there may be more desirable ways of doing timetabling. Thus, to ‘make the job moreefficient’ (utterance 28) might mean computerising the production of the schooltimetable. Such an innovation would have significant implications for colleagues. Itmight, for example, introduce new lead times for determining curriculum prefer-ences and it might alter the format for submitting timetable requests. Thesepossibilities mean that all colleagues would be required to change their workpractices by upskilling themselves, especially those who are relatively unschooled incomputing. Regardless of how the particular implications might play themselves out,LT#4 has made a value judgement about the best way for the school to dotimetabling. Since LT#4 can be shown to be concerned with ‘the right thing’ as wellas ‘things right’, he shares the characteristics of both a leader and a manager, thusvitiating the normative division of labour entrenched in the Bennis and Nanusdistinction.

Exceptionalism also generates some unintended and unhelpful consequences,two of which are potentially toxic. First, while highlighting the presumed superiorityof leaders, the idea of exceptionalism serves to residualise non-leaders as ‘followers’and to infantilise them, sheep-like, within a culture of dependency. For this reason,some critics of leadership (e.g. Gabriel 1997) highlight the experience of non-leadership as conducive to a sense of learned helplessness and disempowerment. Asecond, and potentially more damaging, consequence for systemic and organisa-tional capability is that exceptionalism creates strong incentives for individuals todisengage from the pursuit of career roles that carry with them expectations ofleadership. That is, if organisation members learn to associate leadership with thekinds of superlative, larger-than-life behaviour displayed by their high profile man-agers, they begin to feel ‘othered’. When exceptionalism becomes the overridingexpectation, it creates a self-fulfilling prophecy by normalising itself. People begin tomeasure themselves according to the new norm and experience themselves aswanting. Thus, the sheer intensity of the work patterns of leaders modelled beforetheir eyes prompts colleagues to question whether in their own case they have ‘whatit takes’, and also whether they want to have what it takes, for the bar to besurmounted (in the form of numerous role demands and responsibilities) to attainrecognition as a leader is seen to be set way too high. The difficulty currentlyexperienced by a number of education systems in replenishing their existing stocks

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of school principals (see Gronn & Rawlings-Sanaei 2003), for example, is a strikingillustration of what happens when teachers begin to disengage from leadership. Inthis regard, while LT#4 might be cited as an exemplary organisational citizen who,while he countenanced the possibility (later in the interview) of becoming anassistant principal, harboured absolutely no ambition to be a principal. ‘I don’t thinkI want the responsibility of running a school, and the buck always stops with theprincipal’, he said.

Discipline by Design

Exceptionalism, then, represents the triumph of superleadership. Despite the caveatsjust voiced, a graphic instance of the institutionalisation of exceptionalism is therecent adoption of standards for school leaders. Standards-based regimes for schoolleaders represent a modality of leader formation that may be termed ‘designer-leadership’ (Gronn 2003b: 7–26). Leadership by design, where the notion offocused individual leader causality has now become entrenched as a kind ofexplanatory default option, is my final area of concern. It represents the quintes-sence of Foucault’s (1995) notion of the disciplined subject.

Historically, for Foucault (1995), as part of a micro-physics of power, disci-plinary regimes of control, a number of which emerged out of medieval monasti-cism, provided means of subjugating bodies in the interests of docility and utility. Byvarious acts of appropriation, individual bodies or bodily attributes were codified fordistribution to a variety of disciplinary spaces, both physical (e.g. factories, cells,wards, classrooms) and analytical (e.g. therapeutic categories, illnesses). In theFoucauldian cosmology, ‘discipline’ is accomplished through a range of technolo-gies, such as timetables (which, inter alia, articulate rhythms of regularity and amoral economy of time), and supervisory and surveillance practices subsumed underthe shorthand term ‘gaze’. In this sense, presumably, LT#4 would be neither aleader nor a manager for Foucault, but a mere technician of power. Indeed,leadership is part of the coercive apparatus of power, for one leads ‘according tomechanisms of coercion that are, to varying degrees, strict’, and ‘within a more orless open field of possibilities’ (Foucault 2000: 341). So totalistic is the Foucauldianconception of power that, from the point of view of the earlier theme of visibilisation,the gaze, so-called, exposes every aspect of human conduct to scrutiny: for theindividual, there is simply nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. The inherentlysinister nature of the gaze is symbolised by the panopticon. But an even moresinister form of discipline is disciplined subjectivity. This state of being is accom-plished whenever individuals willingly subjugate their own identities and disposi-tions to normative regimes which require the acquisition of desired aptitudes andbehaviour. For Foucault, then, power expresses itself in its most menacing in-tensified guise when individuals position themselves in a field of normalcy andsubject themselves to a normalising judgement.

This notion of disciplined subjectivity is at once a point of the connectionbetween Foucault and designs for leaders, and a point of divergence. Elsewhere(Gronn 1999, 2002b), I have argued that, historically, systems of leader replenish-

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ment have tended to be organised in accordance with one of three broad sets ofprinciples: ascription, achievement and, most recently, customisation. While ascrip-tion generated a particularistic form of leadership that conformed to a class-basedmale code of gentility, systems of achievement realised the idea of the pursuit ofleadership roles grounded in the impersonal, universalistic knowledge of the acad-emy. Customisation differs from both these principles for it stipulates a predefinedtype (i.e. a design for leadership) that is embodied in standards to which aspiringand practising leaders are expected to conform and it places the judgement aboutthe conformity of practice in the hands of auditing and inspectorial agents accreditedby the standardiser, typically a state agency. In Foucauldian terms, the normalisingof leadership is accomplished by a regulatory rhetorical framework of a range ofanticipated behaviours such as the following which, incidentally, invokes a binarydiscussed earlier in this paper: ‘A school administrator is an educational leader whopromotes the success of all students by …’ (Gronn 2003b: 15). Both prospective andaspiring leader cohorts fall within the purview (or gaze) of the state through theprocesses of initial and ongoing accreditation of school leaders. In this way, thesubjectivities of school leaders become self-disciplined, provided they decide tosubject themselves to the apparatus of control and its assumptions, for then theyhave chosen to ‘normalise themselves’ by acting in conformity with a leadershipdesign blueprint. But this choice is theirs and theirs alone. And this is the point ofdivergence from Foucault, because while discipline systems for him are penal (i.e.punitive), in the new world order of customised leadership, the principle of volun-tarism still applies. That is, prospective school principals and senior school person-nel decide for themselves (albeit from within existing sets of structural and culturalrelations), as part of their career trajectories, to submit themselves to the newleadership formation regime or, as I have suggested, they may choose not to andinstead disengage. Despite the blandishments of their peers and superiors, no-onenecessarily coerces them to be, or to want to be, school leaders. In this sense,leadership disengagement represents a disavowal of Foucauldian disciplined subject-ivity.

Designer-leadership, then, may be thought of in terms comparable to otherdesign systems as akin to the technique of cloning. As a means of discipliningleadership practice, cloning provides a politically attractive, demand-driven alterna-tive to the kind of supply-side self-regulated professional norms belittled by neo-liberals as evidence of ‘provider capture’. The reconstitution of leadership throughcloning, however, as I have pointed out elsewhere (Gronn 2003b), may be conduc-ted in accordance with at least two different sets of norms, each of which appears tobe in tension with the other. The first is the normative behaviour-based approach tostandards just discussed. The second is the attempt to privilege various forms ofempirical data or ‘evidence’ of practice to drive leaders’ decisions. Whereas the lattermay be described as selective in its appropriation of practice (i.e. all knowledge otherthan cumulative knowledge of ‘what works’ can be dismissed as dangerous orunacceptable knowledge), the former is unequivocal in its denial of practice. Thus,in terms reminiscent of accusations of professional provider capture, Murphy andShipman (1999: 217) suggest that mapping existing practice ‘would not be wise’ for

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this would ‘advantage the status-quo in the profession (which we judged as anundesirable state)’ and marginalise teaching and learning issues. Whether, how andwhen these tensions will be resolved remains uncertain.

Towards a New Leadership Imagination?

In their recent mapping of the field of educational leadership, Gunter and Ribbins(2002) distinguished five knowledge domains: conceptual, critical, humanistic,evaluative and instrumental. In this paper, I have confined my remarks to aspectswhich relate to their first two domains. This is because I have adopted a broadlyquestioning or critical stance towards the entire conceptual validity of leadership. Aswas suggested at the outset, the rationale for this critique is that in trying to betterunderstand leadership over 20 years or so, this concept has become more and moreproblematic for me. In light of the six concerns that I have just identified, my answerto the question of who needs leadership is directed, in sequence, to three mainaudiences: the general public, policy-makers and the scholarly community. The firsttwo are dealt with briefly and the third at greater length.

The first point is that, if the term ‘leadership’ originated in everyday discourseand its common sense meaning was appropriated for scholarly purposes, which wasthe suggestion I cited from Calder (1977) then, in the absence of a more attractivelexical candidate, leadership will presumably retain its popular currency. Second,until such time as leadership begins to lose its potency or its symbolic political glossbecomes tarnished, then politicians of all persuasions are likely to continue aligningthemselves with it to help shore up the legitimacy of their policy reform proposals.Third, in regard to the scholarly community, my plea is for intellectual modesty, andfor a much more measured and parsimonious approach to leadership. In my recentwritings I have characterised the emerging phenomenon of work intensification as aform of ‘greedy work’. In a similar vein, leadership has been transformed into anover-indulged ‘greedy’ concept. That is, its conceptual and explanatory space hasnow become unduly stretched, inflated and bloated by commentators who, frankly,in their accounts of how schools and other organisations might be expected tooperate and accomplish their purposes, have imposed far too heavy a burden ofexpectations on it. If, therefore, leadership is to retain any explanatory purchase,these demands will need to be dramatically scaled down.

There are a number of ways to do this. One might be to rethink or dispensewith some of our prevailing assumptions about leadership. These include its individ-ualism, its exaggerated sense of agency, its naive realist ontology, its presumedcausal potency and, in particular, the pet dualisms I referred to earlier. In this way,the field might begin to shed itself of the conceit of exceptionalism. I hasten to addthat to abandon exceptionalism need not mean jettisoning a belief in the exceptionalcapacities of individuals per se (although Shapin’s and Mukerji’s caveats about‘genius’ are a salutary warning here), but merely discarding a commitment toexceptionalism as a description of, and a prescription for, sound organisationalpractice. Another possibility is to rethink leadership methodologically. When under-taking research in a school, for example, a more parsimonious approach (in keeping

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with the spirit of the leader substitute idea) might mean not taking the presence ofleadership (or its absence, for that matter) for granted. Instead, it would be morehelpful if researchers were to inquire of prospective informants: first, whether theyperceive leadership to be manifest in the case study site; next, what they understandby ‘leadership’; then, what form that leadership takes (i.e. is there one leader, morethan one leader or is leadership distributed between, say, couples?) and, finally, whyleadership might take this form. In these ways, the aggregated raw material gener-ated by a leadership researcher would comprise empirically grounded knowledge ofcontextualised perceptions and understandings, as well as some measure of theextent of informants’ agreement about those matters. This material would thenprovide a useful starting point from which to construct an analysis of the processesthat have helped to determine these working assumptions and the causal contribu-tion made by leadership in accomplishing organisational outcomes, relative to othercandidate siblings in the family of terms.

A third possibility is to provide an alternative conceptualisation to the receivedinstrumental wisdom in the field. A fruitful candidate in this respect, to which I havealready made passing reference throughout the paper, might be ‘distributed leader-ship’. Gunter and Ribbins (2002) chose this term to illustrate their typology, and ina previous article (Gronn 2002a) I explored at length some of the properties of‘distributed’ practice. There is insufficient space here to rehearse the entirejustification for, and the meaning and significance of, distributed leadership, butsome indication of the potential it opens up might be helpful. Far from this ideabeing counterposed to focused leadership, in yet another unproductive binary, orbeing dismissed by critics as a kind of nerdish counter-narrative which merelytrumpets the voices of the unexceptional in the face of the hegemony of theexceptional, a distributed perspective on leadership should assist the overall projectof visibilising work and sharpen our understanding of work practices.

There has been a recent upsurge of interest in distributed leadership. Thisinterest is evident in a steady and expanding trickle of publications on distributedphenomena and in a growing frequency of usage of the term ‘distributed’. A rangeof factors accounts for this sudden take-off. One particularly important cluster ofconsiderations is concerned with the increasing complexity of work. Self-evidently,work in schools and universities has intensified due to the huge array of mandatoryaccountability and audit requirements as part of the price paid for self-managedinstitutional autonomy within a culture of performativity. Again self-evidently, muchof this New Public Management control regime, with its panoply of surveillancetechniques and imposition of disciplined subjectivity, is only possible due to therestructuring of work by networked information technology. Computerised workpractices, for example, demand previously unimagined levels of technical masteryand cognitive flexibility on the part of employees while simultaneously vastlyextending the scope and reach of an organisation’s collective ‘intelligence’. It is theintersection of these kinds of trends which should be the spur for leadershipresearchers to re-examine the articulation of work, for their impact goes to the heartof an organisation’s division of labour.

How does a division of labour operate? A division of labour is a dynamic

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imperative in which there is a tension between task differentiation and task inte-gration or, if it is preferred, fission and fusion. In brief, from time to time, due bothto external constraints and the seizing of opportunities and possibilities, the tasksand activities that structure workflows begin to proliferate, mainly due to pressuresto specialise and redefine functions and operations within the labour process. Whilethese developments are occurring, these emerging specialisms are being reconfiguredinto new systems of control and new designs for work. Now in these circumstances,regardless of whether they have as their particular focus the reconfiguring of thework of learning in schools, universities or other educational settings, commentatorsand researchers require conceptual categories which will maximise their analyticalpurchase on these trends. Prescriptively static dualisms, particularly those such as‘leader–followers’ which presume or take for granted a division of labour, are unableto respond adequately to this challenge. The reason is that the re-articulation ofwork as part of the dynamic of the division of labour modifies two key elements ofemployee relations: modes of interdependence and modes of coordination. Andattention to these actualities is vital if students of leadership are to comprehend howdifferent forms of work get done.

Interdependence between organisational agents is concerned with the ways inwhich they fulfil their role responsibilities. While some formal responsibilities may bediscrete, others may overlap or complement one another. In practice, the degree ofcomplementarity and overlap may be greater than is commonly acknowledged. Nias(1987: 31), for example, in her case study of an English primary school, notes that‘interdependence was a characteristic of the whole staff’ and was not just confinedto the relationship between Audrey Proctor, the nursery infant school head, andJulie Harris, her deputy. Role complementarity and overlap are sure signs that theaccomplishment of workplace responsibilities depends on reciprocal actions ratherthan solo performance. Coordination, on the other hand, refers to the alignment andmanagement of the activities which, taken together, constitute particular workprojects or the totality of ongoing work. Coordination is facilitated by a varietyof scheduling, sequencing and control mechanisms. The effect of colleagues’coordinated effort is to facilitate ‘conjoint agency’ (Gronn 2002a: 431) through theircognitively aligned plans and their reciprocally experienced influence patterns.Acknowledgement of the interplay of interdependence and coordination may beinformal or it may be formalised. Informal recognition was evident in the tacitlyunderstood working division of labour between Proctor and Harris, for example, forNias (1987: 39) shows that the latter’s classroom ‘morning round’ emerged inresponse to a change in morning traffic patterns which meant that ‘Miss Proctorcould no longer get in early to school and since I [lived] locally we agreed that I’dget there first thing’. By contrast, the deliberate sharing of a role space by twoco-principals, as part of a dual authority approach to school administration withinone Australian Catholic religious order, is a good illustration of the formalising ofinterdependence and coordination (Gronn & Hamilton 2004).

The final contention of this paper is that, provided leadership can rework someof its discursive rigidities, so as to more adequately account for and represent thesecomponents of the division of labour, it may retain its conceptual utility. The reality

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of distributed practice signalled in the preceding passages and examples, however, isunlikely to find universal acceptance. Those tempted, for whatever reason, to clingto a version of focused exceptional leadership, might ponder the following irony. Ina variety of settings, a well-established norm for executive level managers (such asCEOs, vice-chancellors, deans, principals, etc.), who are appointed as leaders to do‘the right thing’, is to surround themselves with an apparatus of secretaries, personalassistants, advisors, deputies and support groups. Why? A clue is found in remarksto the effect that ‘the job is too big for one person’ or ‘I could not do this job withoutX, my PA’. These comments are a statement of the obvious for, surely if such peoplehad the capacity to accomplish everything on their own, as such shorthand as ‘WhileY was the Managing Director of Acme, he turned its fortunes around’ suggests, theymight dispense with all their helpers. But does anyone seriously suggest this as apossibility? To do their job properly (in the sense of fulfilling the responsibilities forwhich they are accountable) they rely on many other people. If the ‘obviousness’ oftheir comments is an acknowledgement of the inherently distributed nature of theirwork, then the challenge for leadership commentators, it seems to me, is to begin totake that obviousness literally.

NOTES

[1] For reasons of economy, I concentrate on ‘management’ and its derivatives, and assume forpresent purposes that management and administration are synonymous.

[2] This transcript was obtained as part of the Readiness for Leadership project, for whichfunding was received from the Monash University Small Grants scheme.

[3] ‘Leading teacher’ is the most senior teacher class career grade. New principals come mostlyfrom this class.

[4] CASES (Computerised Administrative Systemic Environment in Schools) is a networkedcomputerised management information program which is mandatory for all governmentschools. It is the vehicle for schools’ transmission of a variety of outcome target-related andevaluative data, and for their collation against state-wide and like-school benchmarkedperformance norms.

[5] I am grateful to Nicholas Allix for this point.

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Notes on Author

Peter Gronn is currently Professor and Associate Dean (Development) in the Faculty ofEducation, Monash University, where he was previously Associate Dean (Teaching). Peter hashad a longstanding interest in leadership. He has taught, researched and published on organisa-tional and educational leadership for nearly two decades, and coordinates Master’s level leader-ship programs in the Faculty. Peter is a member of five editorial boards, including SchoolLeadership & Management. His most recent book is The New Work of Educational Leaders (London:Sage/Paul Chapman, 2003).E-mail: peter.gronn@education.monash.edu.au

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