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Journal of Education for Business
ISSN: 0883-2323 (Print) 1940-3356 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/vjeb20
Leadership: A critical text (2nd ed.)
James L. Morrison
To cite this article: James L. Morrison (2015) Leadership: A critical text (2nd ed.), Journal of Education for Business, 90:5, 284-285, DOI: 10.1080/08832323.2015.1020278
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08832323.2015.1020278
Published online: 25 Mar 2015.
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Book Review
Western, Simon. Leadership: A Critical Text (2nd ed.). Los Angeles, CA: Sage. (2013). 360 pp. ISBN: 978-1-4462-6990-9 (paperback). $58.
A JOURNEY TO UNDERSTANDING LEADERSHIP AND ITS EFFECT ON ORGANIZATIONAL
OUTCOMES
This is a text about challenging our understanding of lead-ership and its impacts on organizational outcomes. Simon Western has structured his text into two discrete segments: Part I—Deconstructing Leadership and Part II—Recon-structing Leadership. In this regard, Western begins by focusing on current assumptions about leadership and how these perspectives likely distort the framework for studying the discipline. Then, there is an intriguing discussion of how varying leadership frameworks have changed over the past decades, resulting in reconstructing the way we go about devising strategies for becoming effective in this role. The target audiences for the text are business faculty, undergraduate or graduate students, and actual practitioners out in the field.
Initially, Western, in Chapter 1 presents what he labels as a critical framework consisting of what he references as specific frames for understanding the leadership process. These frames are identified as emancipation, depth analysis, looking awry, and network analysis. In this regard, emanci-pation refers to a leader’s role for promoting justice, ethical behavior, and a sustainable environment, among other out-comes. Depth analysis consists of the process of discover-ing underlydiscover-ing patterns, structures, and influences for identifying the dynamics of leadership within a social, political, and economic framework. Looking awry is an attempt by Western to illustrate the importance of liberating oneself from past assumptions and theories about how to become an effective leader. Finally, network analysis is the capacity of individuals to view leadership from a system’s perspective by examining the interrelationships between technology, bureaucratic hierarchies, and use of power.
In Chapter 2, a comprehensive review of varying defini-tions of leadership are provided. Asymmetric leadership is the topic of Chapter 3 in which Western attempts to point
out the significance of leadership at different levels in today’s business organizations. In Chapter 4, Western examines in some detail the relationship between the use of power and leadership effectiveness. Considerable attention is provided to the process of leading groups based on tradi-tional organizatradi-tional norms. The next discussion in Chapter 5 is how organizational culture influences leadership and vice versa. In the final chapter of Part I, Western focuses on what he labels as corporate fundamentalism and autonomist leadership and how changing worker expectations impacts on the capacity of individuals to make rational decisions among dissenting voices typically found in large complex organizations.
Part II of the text begins with the presentation of what Western calls the four discourses or types of leadership. A discourse is defined as a way of thinking (often noted as system’s thinking) reflecting ideas, attitudes, beliefs, and norms as individuals determine a course of action within a framework of new discovery. Chapter 9 focuses on West-ern’s interpretation of controller leadership, which is described as a leader’s tendency to control the allocation of resources to arrive at maximum efficiency. This leadership style is reflective of what has been often associated with an hierarchical pyramid structure. This organizational frame-work is typical of complex corporations that began as a new discovery in the early part of the 20th century and illustrated through the creation of mass production of auto-mobiles by the Ford Company. The next discourse labeled by Western is therapist leadership in Chapter 10 and depicts a post–World War II attempt to humanize leadership to reflect the needs of the worker at that time. This was the era when the emotional and psychological aspects of working were considered just as important as viewing workers as simply functional objects. In this regard, the soft skills of leadership were emphasized.
As the controller and therapist discourses were not deliv-ering as much success as expected, the next leadership dis-course that emerged during the 1980s is labeled by Western as Messiah Leadership. In Chapter 11, Western describes this new discovery of leadership of individuals being more charismatic, visionary, and transformational. To Western, this discourse depicts a new era in which there is a shift from bureaucratic and managerial control to self-managed work schemes. The final fourth discourse developed by
JOURNAL OF EDUCATION FOR BUSINESS, 90: 284–285, 2015 CopyrightÓTaylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 0883-2323 print / 1940-3356 online DOI: 10.1080/08832323.2015.1020278
Western is that of Eco-Leadership in Chapter 12. This new discovery around the year 2000 depicts leadership focusing not only on generating profits in organizations, but also addressing issues related to climate change, the environ-ment, diminishing natural resources, and public education. It is during this stage where networking, collaboration, and personal accountability become prevalent as leaders engage others in finding solutions to societal issues. Connectivity and interdependence become part of a new rallying call for social responsible business practices.
In the final 3 chapters of the text, Chapters 13–15, West-ern summarizes the context with which leadership may be studied. During this segment of the text, he carefully delin-eates the strengths and weaknesses of each discourse. In addition, he provides examples of failed leadership as reflected in the 2008 financial crisis and the recent Arab Spring. Western concludes his text with an observation that leadership is primarily about inspiring others to achieve beyond their own expectations by generating new ideas, organizational norms, and standards of performance.
The strength of the text is how Western integrates past crit-ical thinking that resulted in new discoveries on how to lead as both the marketplace and societal norms changed over the past century. It is definitely a text that integrates political, social, and economic perspectives into the analysis of what exactly is leadership. Western does an excellent job depicting leadership as a distributed process, thus challenging the
notion that leaders are actually organizational heroes. The weakness of the text is Western’s neglect of how social media, the emergence of virtual organizations, and the new digital generation of workers is impacting on not only the study of leadership, but also how expectations of today’s digi-tal worker are changing how and where work is performed.
This text is an intriguing read for those faculty currently engaged in generating a new cadre of leaders to meet today’s responsibilities and those of tomorrow. With the relationship between the fields of management and leadership more clearly defined in this piece by Western, the time may be appropriate for a new discussion. Western suggests that man-agers also are applying leadership skills when getting tasks done as well as leaders are using managerial skills to serve as role models. Developing trust is key to both managers and leaders, and workers develop that trust by observing others in action. This edition can serve as a course textbook in an introductory leadership course or perhaps an outside reading for a course in organizational behavior. It also could be an assigned reading for master of business administration students to graduate business students. The journey Western takes us on is intriguing and one the that merits consider-ation as we prepare our next generconsider-ation of leaders.
James L. Morrison
University of Delaware Newark, Delaware, USA
BOOK REVIEW 285
