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While gender-related inequalities at work remain common, examples of their elimination, though rare, do exist. This paper provides an empirical examination of the acquisition of equal pay by women in the Post Office between 1870 and 1961. Using the dual theoretical axes of strategic action and structural constraint, it focuses upon the collective action of social groups, and the structural constraints within which they acted. Arguing that structure and action cannot be isolated from each other except for heuristic purposes, it concludes that men were the primary inhibitors of equal pay, and politically buttressed market forces its crucial promoter.

This book offers a new insight into leadership in the public sector: It describes public leadership as a form of collective leadership in which leaders from a range of public, private and voluntary organisations share a common aim in improving the life of communities. It examines the current focus on public service reform and highlights the impact that performance targets have had on leadership. The importance of the role of the individual leader is acknowledged, but it argues that this role is not to provide the answers but to ask intelligent questions in tackling wicked issues that undermine well being. The book explores the experience of reform across the sector and sets some tough challenges for government, public institutions and their leaders. It will be of benefit to all who are interested in what the future holds for public services and prompts a different way of thinking about leadership.

Whereas many constructivist and feminist approaches to the social study of technology share an antipathy to technological tietenninism, they offer an insufficiently radical critique of technolagy. Three main problems in "anti-essentialist" critiques of techno logical determinism are identified, all of which mean that such critiques remain committed to a form of essentialism. These characteristics recur in many recent feminist arguments about technology, illustrated by the example of reproductive technologies. To overcome weaknesses in political radicalism based on anti-essentialism, it is necessary to move to a "past-essentialist" approach. The unwillingness to do so is shown to be based on unfounded objections to "excessive" relativism.

Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to consider a challenge to an occupational jurisdiction in the British police. Historically, street cops have defended the importance of operational credibility as a way of sustaining the value of experience, and inhibiting attempts to introduce external leaders. This has generated a particular form of policing and leadership that is deemed by the British Government as inadequate to face the problems of the next decade.


Design/methodology/approach
The project used the High Potential Development Scheme of the British police to assess the value of operational credibility and the possibilities of radical cultural change. Data are drawn from participants on the program, from those who failed to get onto the program, and from officers who have risen through the ranks without access to a fast-track scheme.


Findings
Most organizational changes fail in their own terms, often because of cultural resistance. However, if we change our metaphors of culture from natural to human constructions it may be possible to focus on the key point of the culture: the lodestone that glues it together. Operational credibility may be such a cultural lodestone and undermining it offers the opportunity for rapid and radical change.


Research limitations/implications
The scheme itself has had limited numbers and the research was limited to a small proportion of the different categories outlined above.


Practical implications
If we change our metaphors for culture and cultural change – from natural to constructed metaphors – (icebergs and webs to buildings), it may be possible to consider a much more radical approach to organizational change.


Originality/value
Most assessments of cultural change focus on those charged with enacting the change and explain failure through recourse to natural metaphors of change. This paper challenges the convention that cultural change can only ever be achieved, if at all, through years of effort.

This study seeks to better understand how notions of sovereign power as a response to terrorism are built and bolstered through use of the signifier 'leadership'. Through a post-foundational analysis of the speeches, press conferences and writings of former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, we theorise 'sovereign leadership' as the deployment of the signifier leadership in ways that foreclose language so as to normalise the discourse and acts of sovereign power. Our key finding is that sovereign leadership offers a (misleadingly) straightforward solution to the complex problem of terrorism through foreclosing language so that alternative responses are excluded. In exploring articulations of sovereign leadership, we illuminate its contingency, and therefore, also its contestability, within a system of discursive resources. We posit three foreclosing moments that are drawn upon to bolster the urgency, affective salience and justness of sovereign leadership: emergency, positivity and vulnerability. We conclude by reflecting on the implications of our study for interpreting articulations of leadership in everyday organisational and political life.

Electronic Inspection Copy available for instructors hereLeadership pervades every aspect of organizational and social life, and its study has never been more diverse, nor more fertile. With contributions from those who have defined that territory, this volume is not only a key point of reference for researchers, students and practitioners, but also an agenda-setting prospective and retrospective look at the state of leadership in the twenty-first century. It evaluates the domain and stretches i