Suchergebnisse

Introduction -- The paradigm of the charismatic leader -- Leadership and authority -- Leadership after the death of god -- How to lead with words -- Authentic leadership and its mirror -- Images of leadership -- Followership -- Conclusion -- Bibliography -- Index

There are plenty of books and articles on research methods, but few discuss the nature and purpose of method sections in academic journals. Based on interviews with critical and interpretivist researchers, this short paper examines the nature and purpose of method sections in management and organization studies. We show how researchers make sense of, and struggle with, positivist expectations about the form and content of method sections. Ultimately, we call for greater openness about what method sections might look like and ask whether all academic articles need method sections.

This short paper explores the gamification of an online academic conference. At the conference, digital gamification was meant to stimulate increased levels of participation among attendees. Instead, it resulted in a series of unintended consequences. Precisely because it was all too easy to score points and ascend the virtual leaderboard by means of machine-like grinding, the "Conference Challenge" posed a moral dilemma for its players: each participant had to determine for themselves where the border lay between playing the game and gaming the system. We use this case to raise questions about the ethics of game-playing in an academic context. In particular, we suggest that the Conference Challenge is a distorted reflection of what's already happening in the broader "publication game" in the university.

The idea of 'excellence' has become widespread in the modern university, in part due to UK assessment exercises such as the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) and the Research Excellence Framework (REF). As a result, academic careers are becoming increasingly oriented around publications in highly ranked journals. For critical management scholars, this poses a particular difficulty: how to negotiate the demand for excellence at the same time as maintaining a critical ethos in relation to one's work. Our study, which is based on interviews with members of the editorial board of Organization, examines this tension by outlining the 'secrets of excellence' according to some of the most excellent critical management scholars in the field. Although our tone is at times ironic and provocative, the paper arises from a genuine concern about the risks involved in playing the publication game. Ultimately, we argue that the game of excellence tends to master its players, rather than the other way around.

The interest in organizational play is growing, both in popular business discourse and organization studies. As the presumption that play is dysfunctional for organizations is increasingly discarded, the existing positions may be divided into two camps; one proposes 'serious play' as an engine for business and the other insists that work and play are largely indistinguishable in the postindustrial organization. Our field study of a design and communications company in Denmark shows that organizational play can be much more than just functional to the organization. We identify three ways in which workplaces engage in play: play as a (serious) continuation of work, play as a (critical) intervention into work and play as an (uninvited) usurpation of work.

Critical scholars in the business school are becoming increasingly concerned about the impact of their research beyond the confines of academia. This has been articulated most prominently around the concept of 'critical performativity'. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with critical leadership scholars, this article explores how academics engage with practitioners at the same time as they seek to maintain a critical ethos in relation to their external activities. While proponents of critical performativity tend to paint a frictionless picture of practitioner engagement—which can take the form of consulting, coaching, and leadership development—we show how critical scholars may end up compromising their academic values in corporate settings due to practitioner demands and other institutional pressures. Taken together, these pressures mean that critical scholars often need to negotiate a series of (sometimes insoluble) dilemmas in practitioner contexts. We argue that the concept of critical performativity is unable to contend meaningfully with these tensions because it replicates the myth of the 'heroic-transformational academic' who is single-handedly able to stimulate critical reflection among practitioners and provoke radical change in organizations. We conclude with a call for further reflection on the range of ethical dilemmas that can arise during academic–practitioner engagement.

The leadership literature is full of stories of heroic self-sacrifice. Sacrificial leadership behaviour, some scholars conclude, is to be recommended. In this article we follow Keith Grint's conceptualization of leadership as necessarily pertaining to the sacred, but—drawing on Giorgio Agamben's notion of profanation—we highlight the need for organization scholars to profane the sacralizations embedded in leadership thinking. One example of this, which guides us throughout the article, is the novel A Wild Sheep Chase, by the Japanese author Haruki Murakami. By means of a thematic reading of the novel, we discuss how it contributes to profaning particular notions of sacrifice and the sacred in leadership thinking. In the novel, self-sacrifice does not function as a way of establishing a leadership position, but as a way to avoid the dangers associated with leadership, and possibly redeem humans from their current collective urge to become leaders. Inspired by Murakami's fictional example, we call organization scholars to engage in profanation of leadership studies and, in doing so, open new vistas for leadership theory and practice.

This Introduction argues for the importance of theology for the study of organization. It also draws the contours of a possible 'theology of organization'. Theology of organization, as we use it here, does not refer to a study of organization that is rooted in faith, nor does it refer to a study of religious practices in organizations. Instead, theology of organization recognizes that the way we think about and act in organizations is profoundly structured by theological concepts. In this editorial to the special issue we have three aims: to outline what theology of organization is, to show how it builds upon Carl Schmitt's 'political theology' and Giorgio Agamben's 'economic theology' and finally to propose three different forms that theology of organization can take. These forms of theology of organization respectively (1) analyse organizational concepts as secularized theological concepts, (2) show how theological concepts have survived unaltered in organizational contexts and (3) show how theological concepts have been corrupted or lost their original meaning when deployed in organizational contexts. In the final section of this editorial, we introduce the five contributions to this issue and indicate how they connect to the three forms of theology of organization that we have proposed.