The Fallacy of Misplaced Leadership

The Fallacy of Misplaced Leadership*

Martin WoodUniversity of York

abstract The leadership literature typically talks about the discrete individuality ofits subject and particularly the personal qualities and capabilities of a few key peopleoccupying top positions in a hierarchy. Current leadership research now has begun to generate new knowledge about leadership practice in relations of interpersonalexchange. Nevertheless, there is an urgent need for the ramifications of this insight tobe more sufficiently developed. The current discussion explores how a perspective ofprocess studies challenges the dominance of the field by individual social actors anddiscrete schemes of relations. Its aims are twofold. First, it will show how both ofthese latter epistemologies are lacking and suggest that current leadership research anddevelopment activities must rise to the ontological challenge of processes rather thanthings. Second, it looks at some methodological implications of this way of thinking asa productive incitement to future management studies.

INTRODUCTION

What leadership is has been an enigma of social democracy since the classicalphilosopher-kings of Plato. It also remains a perennial issue in managementstudies, with significant debate concerning the problem of understanding thenature and role of leadership. Are leaders (extraordinarily) necessary? Do leaderspull their followers or do those behind push them? Or, are our theories of lead-ership too static and individualistic (see, for example, Gemmill and Oakley, 1992;Grint, 1997; Hosking, 1988)?

Early approaches treated the individual personality traits of key people as criti-cal – the so-called ‘great man’ or ‘qualities’ approach – (Stogdill, 1950). However,Stogdill concluded leadership could not be pinned down through the isolation ofa set of traits. This led to a twofold focus on styles and acquirable skills rather than

Journal of Management Studies 42:6 September 20050022-2380

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2005. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ,UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

Address for reprints: Martin Wood, Senior Lecturer in Social Theory and Organisation, Departmentof Management Studies, Sally Baldwin Buildings, University of York, Heslington, York YO10 5DD,UK ([email protected]).

inherited qualities. Contingency models allocate significance to the personalitycharacteristics of the individual leader and the context of the environment, believ-ing both determine the kind of leadership behaviour required (Fiedler, 1967). Simi-larly, transactional models define a good leader as someone who integrates gettingthe job done with concern for those actually doing the work (Blake and Mouton,1964).

Modern leadership research extends this focus on the transactions betweenleaders and followers. Situational analyses allow the individual leader a degree offlexibility in generating a repertoire of styles (Hersey and Blanchard, 1977). Herseyand Blanchard’s (1977) model centres on the contingency of follower maturity asan indicator of necessary style from directing to supporting and delegating. Unfor-tunately, the theory and data remain ambiguous and equivocal (Pfeffer, 1977) andraise doubts as to whether thinking of leadership as the personal causation of indi-vidual social actors is very helpful. For example, are leaders able to alter their styleto suit the situation? Are assumptions about the significance of maturity allocatedto the individual follower objectively or subjectively measured? If they are sub-jective, whose view is taken (Rickards, 1999)? In a study of political leadership inliberal democracies, Elgie (1995) suggests leadership style does make a difference.Nevertheless, successful leadership is exercised within a context of macro socialand institutional structures, whose norms and rules govern individual leaderbehaviour. Heifetz (1994) anticipates this problem, arguing the critical issue iswhether people have the ability, motivation and perhaps the freedom to intervenein those situations requiring ‘adaptive’ responses (i.e. leadership). Furthermore, theshift in emphasis over recent years, from planned goals to visions, from commu-nication to trust, from traits to self awareness and from contingency to effectivepresentation, distinguishes between economically driven models of transactional-leadership and the transformational, and sometimes transcendent, appearance ofleaders (Bass, 1985). Such individuals ‘move followers to go beyond their self-inter-ests to concerns for their group or organization’ (Bass and Avolio, 1997, p. 202).Transformational leadership may simply mark a ‘sanitized’ return to neo-traitism(Rickards, 1999), however, elevating those qualities filling followers with longingand desire and so ultimately represent a blatant retreat to the ‘discredited heroics’of stand alone leaders (Gronn, 2002, p. 426).

A problem with such ‘individualistic’ approaches is the psychological origin ofmuch of the theory and data. An assumption is that leaders have certain ‘essen-tial’ qualities and capabilities that can be identified, measured and developed. Thisliterature imagines leadership is best studied by assigning its ‘appearance’ to a fewkey people. It presupposes only certain individuals can be leaders, only certainleaders are appropriate for certain contingencies, or only certain individuals havesufficient flexibility in their leadership styles to match the needs of a number ofdifferent situations. Furthermore, this viewpoint represents the dominant and‘seductive game’ (Calás and Smircich, 1991) of leaders as meaning creating sub-

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© Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2005

jects (Hosking, 1988; Smircich and Morgan, 1982). It is leaders who impressothers; inspire people; push through transformations; get the job done; have com-pelling, even gripping, visions; stir enthusiasm; and have personal magnetism(Maccoby, 2000). Thus, leaders are seen as Prime Movers rather than as emergentphenomena within leaderful situations. Such identity-locating attributes turn outto be more prescriptive than descriptive, however. Managers may well need to dothese things, but simply doing them does not privilege them as ‘leader’ nor assomeone who can be the cause of ‘leadership’. Such prescriptions simplify andmay not be the most appropriate units of analysis within new and ‘virtual’ modesof organizing, whose speed, simultaneity and interconnectivity are now forcing anew kind of encounter with the phenomenon of leadership.

Inspired by the process studies of the British mathematical physicist and philoso-pher Alfred North Whitehead (1967a, 1967b, 1978), as well as those of his con-temporary Henri Bergson (1921, 1974, 1983, 1991, 1999), the current discussionengages with our excessive preoccupation with the psychological approach to lead-ership. It starts with the conjecture that leadership is best understood as a process

rather than a property or thing. Our construal of leadership does not reveal somecombinatory series of clear and distinct elements (for example, leaders and fol-lowers) ‘each one, being, included in itself and including only itself ’ (Deleuze,1993, p. 44). Looked at from the perspective of process each individual elementcan be seen to permeate and melt into one another without dissolving into inde-pendent parts. Whitehead (1967a) similarly points to the qualities of an enduringindividual part already pervading the constitution of those parts succeeding it. Inother words, the actual character of leadership extends into a portion of anotheras a relation or continuity of flow rather than a solid state.

The current discussion explores this claim before mounting a challenge to thehegemony of more omniscient leadership models. At this stage the discussion ismeant to be suggestive rather than conclusive. Its limited aim is to make a plausible case for process thought in management studies in the belief that this canhelp rigorously explain both the phenomenon of leadership and for the purpose ofimaginatively explicating contemporary organizational problems – complex inter-personal relations, change management, or internationalization, for example.

PROCESS STUDIES

Process metaphysics is a distinctive sector of philosophical tradition. Its basic doc-trine opposes the commonplace Western metaphysic that the nature of reality is‘here, now, immediate, and discrete’ (Whitehead, 1967b, p. 180). By contrast,process metaphysics is committed to the fundamentally processual nature of thereal and the terms of reference in which this reality is to be explained and under-stood. It stresses inter-relatedness and holds ‘that processes rather than things bestrepresent the phenomenon that we encounter in the natural world about us’

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(Rescher, 1996, p. 2). The guiding idea is that ‘process is the concrete reality ofthings’ (Griffin, 1986, p. 6; original emphasis). In general, process studies seek toemphasize emergence and becoming rather than sheer existence or being (Chia,1996). They rest on the premise of openness in the progress of human experienceand civilization. Life and society are conceived as a process of creative advance inwhich many past events are integrated in the events of the present, and in turnare taken up by future events – just as people living in Europe are affected by par-ticles released from Chernobyl, so too do business practices in Japan affect theglobal community.

The ‘interconnectedness’ (Whitehead, 1967b, p. 227) and the ‘mutual penetra-tion’ (Bergson, 1921, p. 101) of these physical, social and economic processes oftenseem ineffable and mysterious. Because of this our theories of movement andendurance unwittingly reconstruct experience into concrete ‘things’, each one ofwhich touches ‘without penetrating one another’ (Bergson, 1921, p. 101); in aword, we take a number of abstract states, which we set ‘side by side in such away as to perceive them simultaneously, no longer in one another, but alongsideone another’ (Bergson, 1921, p. 101). The key insight of process studies, however,is how the reality of something existing ‘concretely in itself without transition’(Whitehead, 1967a, p. 49) is a matter of abstractive thinking and not a property ofthe underlying thing itself. Concrete things – for example, leaders, followers, andorganizations – are surface effects. They are simple appearances we employ to givesubstantiality to our experience, but under whose supposed ‘naturalness’ the fun-damentally processual nature of the real is neglected.

This unwitting intellectual strategy continues to inform management studies.We may be thinking of business gurus, policy makers, political leaders, spiritualteachers, fashion icons, pop idols, and sporting heroes, but in all these senses anindividual social actor is a prerequisite for ‘leadership’. Our abstract habits dis-tinguish an individual actor from everything they are not, as being one thing butnot another – a self-identical ‘It’, that is clear and distinct. In doing so we tend todisregard the significance of the internal heterogeneity, or ‘milieu’ (Deleuze, 1994,p. 211) of an individual, even though they cannot be distinguished or isolated fromit. When we establish the personal identity of leaders, for example, we often doso in relation to a set of distinguishing qualities. Such normative qualities can fillfollowers with longing, desire, and envy, which in turn require regulation, control,denial, exclusion, or, alternatively, sublimation and catharsis. By focusing on theindividual leader as the omniscient character of those qualities, however, we mightbe colluding in extant power relations. For Whitehead (1967a, p. 51), this indi-vidualistic way of thinking is an example of the error of mistaking our abstractconceptualizations for the concrete things themselves: the fallacy of misplaced con-

creteness. To overcome this, it is necessary to explore and question the conventionalview that an individual social actor’s ‘identity’ can obtain in a secure and concretesense, without any reference to past, present and future events. Whitehead attempts

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to do this by deliberately reframing the individual social actor as ‘a mode of atten-tion’, one that only provides ‘the extreme of selective emphasis’ (Whitehead,1967b, p. 270).

The critical issue in process studies, therefore, is not the actual qualities of anindividual social actor, but how such an actor ‘condenses within itself . . . a multi-tude of social dimensions and meanings’ (Cooper, 1983, p. 204). Looked at thisway, leadership is not located in ‘the autonomous, self-determining individual witha secure unitary identity [at] the centre of the social universe’ (Alvesson and Deetz,2000, p. 98). On the contrary, the emergence of leadership is more properlydescribed as a ‘systematic complex of mutual relatedness’ (Whitehead, 1967a, p.161), one in which our conceptual interpretations are always ‘an incompletion inthe process of production’ (Whitehead, 1978, p. 327). Leadership is found neitherin one person or another, nor can it be simply located between several people. Insteadit is ‘the point of difference’ (Cooper, 1983, p. 204) at which each turns aroundthe other. In this sense, leadership is already a ‘complete’ relation, where the rela-

tion is the thing itself and each part necessarily refers to another, but without ‘com-pletion’ in a straightforward way. Leadership cannot be reduced to an individualsocial actor or to discrete relations among social actors. Rather, it is the unlocal-izable ‘in’ of the ‘between’ of each, a freely interpenetrating process, whose ‘iden-tity’ is consistently self-differing.

THE MISPLACING OF LEADERSHIP

We have seen how the affirmation ‘leaders make things happen’ is an obvious andrarely questioned way of thinking. Indeed, it is inherent in management studiesto consider ‘the leader as consistent essence, a centred subject with a particularorientation’ (Alvesson and Sveningsson, 2003, p. 961). This individualistic way ofthinking is now widespread. Consider the BBC’s recent searches for the Greatest

Briton (2002) and the Greatest American (BBC, 2003), or, more seriously, in the eventsfollowing the September 11 attacks, the tendency of the West to look toward keyfigures to exercise ‘leadership’ and to entrust individual commanders-in-chief withthe power to go to war. Consider also the 2004 US presidential campaign in whichthe electorate are urged to pick candidates as much on personality as on key issues.For example, candidates whose backgrounds and qualifications for office are notwell known tend to use biographical advertisements to present the most favourableversions of their life stories – John Kerry volunteered to serve in Vietnam wherehis ‘leadership, courage, and sacrifice earned him a Silver Star, a Bronze Star withCombat V, and three Purple Hearts’ (Kerry-Edwards, 2004) – or else the words,or image, of a candidate are used against them to show that the candidate cannotbe believed, or has broken a promise: ‘There’s what Kerry says and then there’swhat Kerry does’ (Bush-Cheney, 2004), or to show that the candidate is in touchwith the concerns and feelings of ‘real people’ – or that the opponent is not: ‘The



America that George Bush has created is one with fewer jobs, increasing healthcosts and more obstacles to achieving the American dream’ (Kerry-Edwards,2004).

It is the same with charismatic, effective, visionary and transformational lead-ership. These beliefs in leadership often attribute power to individual social actorsand it is they whom cause events (Gemmill and Oakley, 1992). UK managementconsultants Goffee and Jones (2000, p. 64) characterize an inspirational leader asneeding ‘vision, energy, authority, and strategic direction’ so as to ‘engage peopleand rouse their commitment to company goals’ (Goffee and Jones, 2000, p. 63).Moreover, those who are led often find the responsibility a leader assumes forvisioning and strategic direction to be important and comforting (Bolman andDeal, 1994). People look to a leader to frame and concretize their reality (Smir-cich and Morgan, 1982). What gets to count as real, however, is often a conse-quence of incipient power. For example, leaders may seek to extend managerialcontrol in the name of practical autonomy through a project of strengthening orchanging an organization’s culture. They might try to promote quality, flexibilityand/or responsiveness improvement by ensuring subordinate commitment to aninstrumental structure of feeling and thought (Willmott, 1993).

The misleading conviction lying behind each of these projects is the existenceof an order of ‘completed’ things through which the individual leaders of ourexperience are apprehended (Whitehead, 1967a, p. 27). But the leader ‘is alwayssocial first and only mistakenly claims the personal self as the origin of experi-ence’ (Alvesson and Deetz, 2000, p. 97). We conceive certain qualities or charac-teristics of ‘leaders’; there is something about them we note. We then findsomebody who possesses these qualities or characteristics and it is through themwe apprehend the individual person. In other words, the individual social actor isthe material of which we predicate the qualities and characteristics. A number ofinterconnected issues and key questions can be introduced to debate our ascrip-tion of leadership to individual social actors (Pfeffer, 1977). For example: How,precisely, are these key individuals identified? What if their exemplary conductand attitudes turn out to be important symbols representing the choice of a socialcollectivity? Might this lead to the selection of only those individuals who matchthe socially constructed image? Does this suggest the primacy of social relationsabove individual behaviour? If we want to determine whether a leader is charis-matic, for example, we might ask in what sense is their charisma a personal quality?Apart from other people would the leader be charismatic? Logically a leadercannot be charismatic in a vacuum. In other words, charisma, effectiveness, vision,and transformation only appear as personal qualities because we have mistakenour abstraction of them for concrete reality. What is at stake, in all of these issuesand questions, is our identification of/with ‘the leader’ but, as we have alreadypointed out, this abstraction is a purposive emanation from the ‘indeterminate

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ultimate reality’ (Griffin, 1986, p. 136) and not a property of the underlying thing itself.

Gilbert Simondon (1992) continues this line of thought in his essay Genesis of the

Individual. For Simondon, what is required is a complete change in mental habit,one in which the process of individuation is considered instead of a misplacedfocus on extant social actors. As he puts it: ‘. . . to grasp firmly the nature of indi-viduation, we must consider the being not as a substance, or matter, or form, butas a tautly extended and supersaturated system’ (Simondon, 1992, p. 301).

According to Simondon, the problem of individuation continues to be formu-lated either in ‘substantialist’ terms of the completed individual or the ‘hylomor-phic’ operation of completion. The first view expresses a completedeterminateness of the individual. In this it looks a lot like management studies,which treats the substantial appearance of leaders as unproblematic and sees theprocess of their individuation ‘as something to be explained, rather than as some-thing in which the explanation is to be found’ (Simondon, 1992, p. 299). Thesenormative strategies ‘aim toward achieving a presence of person qua the ideal ofthe classical subject’ (Day, 1998, p. 96). Each presumes ‘leadership is all about theperson at the top of the hierarchy’ (Barker, 2001, p. 471), or else provides exam-ples of a ‘first among equals’ (Gronn, 2002, p. 430), bypassing the constitutiveprocesses through which such figures are created. The second view does not pre-suppose any absolutely distinct individuality, but does assume a teleological matter-form relation putting the principle into effect. Terms such as ‘charismaticleadership’ (Conger and Kanungo, 1998), ‘servant leadership’ (Greenleaf, 1977,1998), ‘intelligent leadership’ (Hooper and Potter, 2000) and ‘transformationalleadership’ (Bass, 1985), all call to mind the clear idea of a relation between things.Here, the finite circumstances in one term provide a model for the other to aspireto. In the above examples, ‘charisma’, ‘service’, ‘intelligence’, and ‘transformation’,are all preconceived conditions or functions anticipating realization in presentleadership behaviour.

The origin of individuality, therefore, is thought to be either an idealized socialactor exercising influence on external circumstances, or a discrete relation capableof reconciling singular terms. Either way, the process of individuation is not

thought to be capable of supplying the principle itself. In both cases, Simondon(1992) argues, the tendency is to understand the problem of individuation retro-spectively from the principle of things completed (the end of a process), ratherthan from the perspective of the process of individuation, in which their correla-tion is an already complete relation (process itself). It is this point managementstudies often misses. It typically places the individual social actor at the centre ofits accounts and thereby forgets this individual is already a synthesis of differences,not linked through some principle of identity, but through irreducibly heteroge-neous processes, which surround and suffuce it.



PROCESS AS ONTOLOGY AND EPISTEMOLOGY

Contemporary leadership research has now begun to pay attention to leadershipas a process of individuation, rather than as an individual social actor (see, forexample, Barker, 2001; Gemmill and Oakley, 1992; Gronn, 2002; Hosking, 1988;Yukl, 1999). Such approaches variously define leadership as ‘a process of trans-formative change’ (Barker, 2001, p. 491), or a created socio-cultural ‘myth’ to wardoff feelings of uncertainty, ambivalence, and instability (Gemmill and Oakley,1992). Hosking (1988) points to leadership as a skilful process of reality construc-tions and shifting influence and Yukl (1999, p. 292) emphasizes how this processis shared, thereby ‘enhancing the collective and individual capacity of people toaccomplish their work roles effectively’. Gronn’s (2002) dissatisfaction with indi-vidualism leads him to suggest distributed leadership as a technical solution to theidealized figure of the leader as a creating and influencing subject, set apart fromsocial relations. He defines leadership as relations of ‘reciprocal influence’: AÆBand BÆA and sees distributed leadership as a ‘concertive action’ extending theexisting unit of analysis to include leadership as joint action, rather than simplyaggregated or individual acts.

Pettigrew (1997), operating in the allied fields of strategy and organizationalchange, expresses a closely related point. He perceptively argues that process is ‘asequence of individual and collective events, actions and activities unfolding overtime in context’ (p. 338). On his view, process is epistemology we can put to work inexplaining strategy and organizational change and ‘catch this reality in flight’, soto speak (Pettigrew, 1997, p. 338). Nevertheless, this outlook maintains an extantmatter-form relation and importantly fails to recognize the fundamentally proces-sual nature of the real (cf. Chia, 1996, pp. 195–204; Chia, 1999; Tsoukas andChia, 2002). It also contrasts sharply with the thesis offered by Whitehead, forwhom process is specifically of ontological concern.

From a process-as-ontology perspective, Pettigrew’s (1997) contribution does notin itself overturn the commonsense recognition of process as something to beentered into, as an external relation between individual social actors, whose indi-viduality can exist without the relation. In other words, rather than recognizingreality ‘in flight’, his process-as-epistemology attends only to those aspects ofconcrete experience that lie within some discrete scheme of relations. Pettigrewsees process as bounded by human agency and employed as a mode of attention orcritical factor in fixing individuals, events, actions and activities in space. As such,he does not provide a pervasive account of the processual nature of the real in time.

Each of these contributions has considerable merit in helping us to rethink ourepistemological commitments. Nevertheless, the ramifications of their insights willbe more sufficiently developed ‘only if their calls for a greater attention to processlead to a consistent reversal of the ontological priority’ (Tsoukas and Chia, 2002,p. 570). Two useful problematizations of the epistemological focus on process in

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management studies have been Hosking’s work in a relational perspective (see, forexample, Brown and Hosking, 1986; Dachler and Hosking, 1995; Hosking, 1988,2001; Hosking and Morley, 1991) and Barker’s (2001) definition of leadership asa process of transformative change. Hosking uses the terms ‘processes’ and ‘rela-tions’ in order to point out the ongoing connections that construct social realities.Here, her concern is with asking how relational processes are involved in the devel-opment of leadership. This relational perspective strongly resembles a ‘moderate’social constructionist philosophy (Burningham and Cooper, 1999) and expresses aclosely related line of argument to Berger and Luckmann’s (1966) original thesisof reality construction. However, Hosking does not start with the presumption ofdiscrete relations between singular terms (for example, AÆB and BÆA) and,therefore, has to find some other way to speak of what is related to what. By refus-ing to reproduce certain taken-for-granteds about what can be known aboutprocesses and relations, Hosking leaves their nature open to conjecture, and sobegins to explore ontology.

Barker (2001) also attempts to provide important metaphysical support for thisendeavour. He too believes the problem of studying leadership as stabilized formsof various unpredictable social processes lies in the, perhaps inevitable, tendencyto separate leaders from ‘the complex and continuous relationships of people andinstitutions’ (Barker, 2001, p. 483). He too argues the error is in assuming that thepersonal causation of an individual social actor can explain the complex and con-tinuous ‘nature of leadership’. Leadership, he claims, ‘is precisely the complex andcontinuous relationships of people and institutions’ and these ‘must be the foci ofthe explanation of leadership’ (Barker, 2001, p. 483). Barker endorses Pfeffer’s(1977) earlier argument, believing leadership to be a ‘direct, phenomenologicalexperience’ (Barker, 2001, p. 483). Leadership is a ‘dissipative system . . . continu-ally renewing itself within a dynamic context’ (Barker, 2001, p. 487). Whatever weexperience as leadership is itself transforming as a part of the system; the macro-system continually changes as a part of the transformation.

It is this ontological, rather than epistemological, character of transformationand relatedness we can invoke to appreciate leadership as process. AppropriatingCooper’s (1998, p. 171) terminology, the process of leadership is ‘always momen-tary, tentative and transient . . . [it] occurs in that imperceptible moment betweenthe known and the unknown’. Instead of approaching leadership simply as thehas/has not qualities and capabilities of individual social actors – whose conductmay be termed ‘leaderful’ by their conformation to the perfection of some hopedfor ideal, or else by reason of some fortunate spontaneity within a situation – it isthe relation itself, the both/and sharing or ‘vacillating interaction’ (Cooper, 1987)of subjective form and advantageous circumstance that should be our logicalsubject.

As we have already seen, the advantage of confining our attention to self-iden-tical figures is we confine our thoughts to clear-cut definite things with clear-cut



definite relations. Nothing in our experience, however, actually possesses the char-acter of simple location. To so confine our experience is an example of the fallacyof misplaced concreteness, to which Whitehead (1967a) refers. Such a mechanis-tic view presupposes ‘the ultimate fact of a brute matter, or material, spreadthroughout space . . . following a fixed routine imposed by external relations whichdo not spring from the nature of its being’ (Whitehead, 1967a, p. 17). It has thedisadvantage, however, of neglecting events and functions important to our expe-rience. The result is a ‘one-eyed reason, deficient in its vision of depth’ (White-head, 1967a, p. 59), and which, once again, does not re-establish the continuity ofleadership as process.

So, whilst we may not be able to think without the selective pressures elicitingclear-cut definite things, we ought to be more critical of our basic distinctions anddivisions. Our conception of leadership is only a fleeting glimpse of a qualitativemovement of difference that has a certain ‘internal resonance requiring perma-nent communication’ (Simondon, 1992, p. 305). If we want to trace this internalqualitative movement we must start to investigate the question of individuationitself. Here, our concern is with revaluing an individual social actor’s constitutivemilieu in all its variety. This will require us to rethink our ontological priorities.

AN EMANATION OF THE EXCLUDED MIDDLE

The principle of the excluded middle is an example of classical Aristotelian logic.It has a marked bias toward things and substances, which it conceives as eitherhaving or not having a certain definiteness of being, a natural existence that is subjectto a law of all or nothing – i.e. A is either B or not B – (Andrews, 1996). In thecurrent discussion, this amounts to some positive quality or substantial characterof an individual social actor in opposition to a lacking other. The principle of theexcluded middle also suggests the concept of ‘exclusion’: to shut out; to hinderfrom entrance or admission; to debar from participation or enjoyment; to depriveof; to except, etc, which appears to rule out the possibility of a middle groundbetween is/is not and either/or axioms, as a third state, or mediating position.

Hegel’s dialectical synthesis offers a partial solution to this problem. For Hegel,once the individual social actor is no longer treated as a thing-in-itself, it ceases tohave any positive quality or essence. Any subsequent quality is marked only in theprocess of negating its nothingness. To continue to be definite a figure must activelyengage with (negate) what it is not. For example, A is not B and B is not A. Thisnegative reciprocation enables Hegel to declare all differences can be mediated inan Identity of identity and opposition: there can be no identity prior to its rela-tion to others – which is both negative and oppositional (Widder, 2002). Withoutthis opposition ‘being will fade into nothingness’ (Hardt, 1993, pp. 3–4). Logically,however, it also consolidates the place of the opposite and identifies it – the ‘notB’ is itself an identity. Thus Hegel’s dialectical movement continues to rely on an

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identity-politics, in which each empirical figure ‘through its own nature relates itselfto the other’ (Hegel, quoted in Houlgate, 1999, p. 99). The dual nature of thisrelationship means that identity (self ) and difference (other) are reconciled and sohis displacement of quality or essence is only partial.

From a process-as-ontology perspective the reciprocal movement of negation is amisleading notion of difference. Hegel’s ‘dialectic of negation . . . fails to grasp theconcreteness and specificity of real being’ (Hardt, 1993, p. 4). The necessaryquality of leadership we can outline here is positive difference, ‘a positive internalmovement’ (Hardt, 1993, p. 14). This necessary quality is not definite individual-ity per se, but rather ‘an undefined number of potential individualities’ (Bergson,1983, p. 261; original emphasis). According to Bergson (1983, p. 230) our mistake‘is due to the fact that the “vital” order, which is essentially creation, is manifestedto us less in its essence than in some of its accidents . . . like it, they present to usrepetitions that make generalization possible’. However, as Bergson (1983, pp.230–1) continues: ‘There is no doubt that life as a whole is an evolution, that isan unceasing transformation’. In other words, it is continuity that defines the com-position of the real. Its ‘accidents’, by contrast, are simply a juxtaposition of points‘imitating’ this vital order.

As such, we might consider the hitherto excluded middle as a kind of undefinedorder, one that exceeds the logic defining either the singular terms A (for example,the designated leader), or B (for example, the followers), or, for that matter, thedialectical synthesis reconciling one and the other. In other words, A is neither Bnor not-B (Widder, 2002). The ontological status of the excluded middle, its‘essence’, is an open field of movement in which leadership is recognized as partand parcel of the vital process of continuity and not simply the juxtaposition ofleaders and followers, ‘which are only arrests of our attention’ (Bergson, 1983, p.343). Understanding leadership thus, we ought to take seriously the undefinedmiddle sweeping singular terms away (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). This emana-tion of leadership is not directed toward distinguishing a state but rather towardthe identification of an essential movement, in which what endures is undefined:the being-itself of difference, and not the definiteness of identity. The idea ofsimple, objective location has gone and the relation as a thing itself is brought tothe fore.

If we are to reframe our understanding of leadership significantly we must gobeyond both Aristotelian ideas of positive and pure identity and Hegel’s identityof opposites. The nature of leadership must be seen as a creative process, onewhich exceeds the logic of identity and opposition and within which individualsocial actors are only syntactical conveniences; ‘technologies of representationconvert[ing] the inaccessible, unknown and private into the accessible, known andpublic’ (Cooper, 1992, p. 267). Leadership is not located in A where it is apparent(i.e. the designated leader), nor is it simply at B from where it is being recognized(i.e. in the ‘mind’ of followers). Neither is it a series of discrete relationships between



A and B (AÆB and BÆA). It is, rather, the undefined middle, the in of the between(A´B), where both A and B are ‘inseparable moments’ (Deleuze, 1983), each nec-essarily referring back to the other.

We are not used to this way of thinking, however. When we conceive of lead-ership, we do so ‘only through a mist of affective states’ (Bergson, 1983, p. 231),which we then try to combine to produce our knowledge. Because indefinitenessis traditionally thought as an absence and because, as Bergson (1974, p. 141)observes, ‘we have an eye to practice’, we always look for an immediate and com-plete solidification. Hence, for example, when The Economist (2003, p. 4) talks of a‘gap between expectations and reality’ and ‘a “crisis of confidence” in corporateleadership’, it means the perception of an absence of satisfaction and an apparentlack of certainty – we look for definiteness but find indefiniteness. We alwaysexpress indefiniteness as a function of definiteness; an absence of definiteness,rather than as itself: ‘it is indefinite’. This, Bergson (1983) reasons, is because indefi-niteness is assumed to have no ‘It’. The assumption is there is something – ‘somethings’ – in definiteness, but indefiniteness is empty, it is an absence of things; itcontains ‘no things’. So, Bergson (1983, p. 334) concludes, the mind ‘swings tooand fro, unable to rest’ between two, irreducible kinds of order – definiteness/indefiniteness and presence/absence. We tend to affirm the first and shut our eyesto the second. It does not occur to us to detach ourselves from the partial expres-sion and attend to the complete notion of in/definiteness in order to grasp thisirreducibility – everything is double without being two (Deleuze, 1994). It is ratherlike the frame of a painting, which, although separating itself not only from thebody proper of the work, but also from the wall on which the painting is hung,simultaneously connects one to the other (Derrida, 1987).

PROCESSES OF BECOMING

The foregoing enables an awareness of the being of becoming, within whose inter-nal relations a concretization or occurrence appears and disappears before oureyes. What a pity received thinking on leadership has a tendency to assume con-cretization within an individual social actor means ‘undifferentiated sameness’(Whitehead, 1967a, p. 133) – a definite individuality, which is, however precari-ously, a natural thing-in-itself, enduring here in space. But what if endurance doesindicate an indefinite pattern of inter-relatedness rather than a definite identity?A tune, as distinct from a succession of detached notes, is an example of such anindefinite pattern. The individual notes make only limited sense on their own, butcan make a great deal of difference when referred beyond themselves to the par-ticular tune – even middle ‘C’ is importantly relational in this respect. We do nothear the ‘C’ simply by segregating it from the endless complex of audible notesthat are ‘not C’. We hear it as a continuous flow from the ‘E’ played a momentbefore: the qualities of ‘E’ pervade the constitution of the ‘C’ that succeeds it.

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Thus, the notes do not exist in discrete juxtaposition; rather they intermingle andpenetrate one another.

This displacement of individuality and simple location relates to leadership inthe sense of those who are aware of themselves as centred ‘inside’ an insulatedcontainer – free from the contamination of the threatening ‘other’ which is locatedon the ‘outside’ – miss the subtle relations ‘in’ the ‘between’ of things. They arecaptured by an illusion generated by the mechanisms of ‘ego protection’ (Battersby,1998, p. 52), safeguarding them from examination as reifications of individuatingprocesses. These private predicates of experience no longer have to be thought asthe definite individuality of strictly segregated elements, however, but as a middle,as always in the middle, virtually and paradoxically. The middle is an ‘alter-individuality’ that cannot anchor the place of an individuality defined against it.Bergson’s starting point, therefore, like Whitehead’s, is ontological. He focuses onthe emergence of enduring patterns having to be seized from the original flow ofprocess. Patterns enjoy no individuality of content, being more properly conceivedas ‘succession without distinction’ (Bergson, 1921, p. 100). Bergson describes acomplex relationship involving a living interpenetration connecting all ‘things’ atall places and times and which ‘adopts the very life of things’ (Bergson, 1999, p.53). Our experience of reality manifests itself as a continual change of form, where‘form is only a snapshot view of transition’ (Bergson, 1983, p. 302).

Notwithstanding this, it would be a mistake to say there is no possibility of suc-cession without distinction. For example, despite the linear word-space structureof phonetic writing there can hardly be a text written in which there is not somevestige of the time and labour of its writing (Derrida, 1978), or else some personalmark left by its author. This time and labour and these personal marks put thoughtsand words, as well as readers and authors like you and I, into an irreducible rela-tion, one with the other, in a way that implies we are both immanent within aprimary process. Moreover, there is an additional sense in which a text is also adifference in-itself. The moment a text is written there is evidence of a selectionand, therefore, of organization and this organization already implicates some previous disorganization. In other words a text’s definiteness is always in dynamicrelation with an indefiniteness preceding it. Furthermore, whilst Bergson (1983)himself admits representational writing is inescapable, we can choose to write inone of two ways: first, to represent states, or, second, to represent a concern forrelations, processes, and differences. In general, Bergson argues, we too easily writeto represent states rather than movement. Certainly, the tendency to abstract andrepresent has practical utility: breaking movement up into things allows us to act,but we can seek to do this from within the moving reality. Bergson advocateswriting in verbs as this calls up the ‘inner work’ of movement rather than ‘readyprepared’ states (Bergson, 1983, p. 11; cf. Bohm, 1980). Derrida (1978, p. 219)similarly suggests writing ‘theoretical fictions’ within which there can be ‘no sov-ereign solitude of the author’ (p. 226). Both views chime with Whitehead (1978,



p. 182), for whom ‘imaginative writing’ opens the world to our senses, precipitat-ing endless feelings and thoughts and enabling us to bring our whole self toreading.

The important point is we can still gain considerable leverage by affirming theindefiniteness of leadership and not its definiteness as an object of nature, althoughthe shortfalls of intellectual abstraction can never be wholly avoided. The formerallows the possibility of supplementing the intellect with experience (Bergson,1983). This is valuable because the intellectual perspective of definite being findsit impossible to conceive ‘properly human experience’ (Bergson, 1991, p. 184). Theintellect ‘will always settle on ‘the conceptual forms . . . it is accustomed to see’and, therefore, ‘will always neglect the part of novelty or of creation’ (Bergson,1983, p. 270). By adopting the rhythm of its ‘relational essence’ (Whitehead, 1967a,p. 160) we find it difficult to divorce leadership from any reference to a socialcontext or to some communistic processes. For example, the essence of leader ‘A’is always undefined, fluxing, it always conjointly involves an ingression with andnot simply recognition by another: ‘B’. In this way the original being of leadershipis properly described as a ‘systematic complex of mutual relatedness’ (Whitehead,1967a, p. 161). These processes are leadership. That is to say the becoming of lead-ership is affirmed as it’s being. Leadership is a becomingness in which the fixity ofephemeral arrangements conversely comes and goes (Bergson, 1974).

Accordingly, we can treat all appearances as transient abstractions as a mode ofattention or symbolic fixing of this continuity of flow and not the apprehensionof the distinct figures themselves. Furthermore, we might begin to ask how wemight attend to the processes of creation laying behind the individual social actorswe value so highly. Reaching an understanding of process and becoming not onlyrequires a rethinking of ontological priorities, therefore, but also of our episte-mological interests and methodological concerns.

IMPLICATIONS FOR STUDYING LEADERSHIP

Management studies typically attribute leadership processes to the personal cau-sation of individual social actors. This is argued, increasingly, to be a conceptualmistake. The alternative analytical focus on the discrete relations of collective ordistributed leadership, in which the relation remains external to the related things,is only a partial and relative solution. It, too, is a conceptual mistake. From theprocess-as-ontology perspective, real endurance is inter-relatedness, or differencein-itself and not discrete identity or relations of identity and difference. Processstudies do not start with the hegemonic purity and certainty of individual ‘iden-tity’. Nor do they proceed via the negative constitution of an ‘other’ against whichsocial actors can ‘identify’ themselves. Instead, they offer a third thesis that dis-turbs the dogmatism of identity and folds concern for identity-politics into a hith-erto excluded middle, in which identity is relational, the difference of identity itself.

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Epistemological Development

The epistemological problem is not to seek to understand the private world of pas-sions, intentions and influence of individual social actors, or the discrete opera-tion of individuation, but rather to explore the values associated with the internalmovement of difference. Consider, for example, the appropriateness of the sen-tence ‘It is leadership’ (Bohm, 1980, p. 29). Adapting Bohm’s (1980) enquiry intothe subject-verb-object structure of language, we might ask: what is the ‘It’ doingthe leading? Following Bohm once more, wouldn’t it be more accurate to say‘Leadership is going on’? Similarly, instead of saying ‘Leaders act on followers’,we can say more appropriately, ‘leadership is going on within a subtle synthesis ofinternal differences without mediation or relation to others’; an immanent rela-tion making any bracketing of the abstractions customarily called ‘leaders’ and‘followers’ difficult to sustain.

With this in mind, a particular leadership figure cannot be construed as a simpleelement, present at hand, getting caught up in life. The figure does not ‘find itself ’in relation to its ‘environment’, but rather the on-going ‘relation’ itself is an intrin-sic feature of the figure’s being. Moreover, the figure comes to be spoken in termsof a ‘non-localizable relation sweeping up . . . two distant or contiguous points,carrying one into the proximity of the other’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 293).The ‘essence’ of leadership is not the individual social actor but a relation ofalmost imperceptible directions, movement and orientations, having neither begin-ning nor end.

The original work of the biologist Lynn Margulis (Margulis and Sagan, 1986)on symbiogenesis provides a prime illustration of such perpetual movement. Evi-dence from the fossil record suggests evolution from the ‘primordial soup’ did notoccur by separate entities competing with one another in the struggle for life, butrather through a cooperative life process. Life forms multiply and increase com-plexity in symbiosis with other forms, not just by killing them. The merging oforganisms into new collectives involves a gradual coming together leading to phys-ical interdependence and a permanent sharing of cells and bodies. The directexample Margulis and Sagan offer is of the intracellular organelle, the mitochon-drion, whose DNA is incorporated into its mammalian successors and is now a‘normal’ constituent of the latter’s cells, to the extent that it is hard to decide whereone starts and the other stops.

The phenomenon of symbiogenesis also accounts for the internal qualitativerelation of people, information systems, commercial markets and so on. New tech-nologies restructure organizational and social environments so human beings areno longer seen as separate from the rest of life. For example, the much vauntedqualities and capabilities of individual social actors are increasingly constructed,coordinated and consumed in ‘without walls’ organization. One impact of thesenew and ‘virtual’ modes of organizing has been to blur familiar representations



and simple location. Leaders are ‘ingested’ into self-managing teams and groups,whose organizational working practices are constituted, renegotiated and extendedby advanced information and communication technologies such as e-mail and theInternet (Brigham and Corbett, 1997). Thus, symbiogenesis enables an under-standing of leadership similar to process studies. Both enable a conception of lead-ership as a cycling through of (de)formation and (de)stabilization. This concernimplies a widening of the prevalent research emphasis from its conventional insis-tence on the authoritative accounts of individual social actors, and toward anunderstanding of their identification as temporary stabilizations drawn from aninternal movement of difference.

Methodological Considerations

A process approach to leadership is consistent with Nietzsche’s (1994) genealogi-cal analysis as well as with ideas from critical management research, which empha-size leadership as a social field of activity (Alvesson, 1996; Alvesson and Deetz,2000). A ‘process methodology’ applied to leadership brings three, interrelatedfactors to the fore. First, leadership is always enmeshed in social practice ratherthan in a clear-cut, definite figure. This focus brings the space of the stage or sceneto the centre of analysis and not the immediate individuality of a social actor whocan be simply located, or the discrete relations, which obtain between familiar rep-resentations of ‘leaders’ and ‘followers’. Second, because leadership is irreducibleto simple location and subject to a myriad of ‘meanings, values, ideals and dis-course processes’ (Alvesson, 1996, p. 472) we might conjecture leadership is fun-damentally a process and a process is not an object, but a tending toward novelty,innovation, and emergence. In other words, a process methodology aims to studychange and not things that change (Bergson, 1974; cf. Pettigrew, 1997). Third,because the enduring figures we come to recognize in a specific social context arenot the inherent qualities or substantial characteristics of leadership as it really is,but an ongoing creative advance, our methodological concern should be with theidentification of an essential movement, a movement that has a certain temporaldimension, a process in time. A process methodology, accordingly, is something forwhich temporality, activity and change are basic propositions.

Now, it would be easy to assume an individual social actor could possess lead-ership if it were reducible to such an underlying figure. But, as we have argued, amistake of management studies is exactly this logic of leadership as if it were ‘syn-onymous’ with an immediate individuality. Leadership is not an a priori empiricalfigure entering into relations with others but whose own sovereignty is not depen-dent on those relations, or on something else other than itself. For a processmethodology, leadership exceeds both conceptions. We can more appropriatelycall it a moving synthesis of differences; a process of individuation guided by dif-ference and creation that gives an appearance of individuality.

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As such, the emergence of leadership can be productively investigated as an‘event’ (Deleuze, 1993; Whitehead, 1967a, 1978; see also, Foucault, 1972). Explor-ing leadership as an event implies a certain movement and a methodological focuson relations, connexions, dependences and reciprocities, over time: a set of advan-tageous circumstances becoming identical with the ‘objective’ subject of leader-ship. In other words, through such a focus, it is difficult to maintain the simpleexteriority of leadership as a clear object of study from the whole domain of insti-tutions, economic processes, and social relations, within which an individual leaderobtains. Process methodology offers a counterproposal to the neo-empiricist ‘treat-ment of theory and interpretation as separate from data’ (Alvesson, 1996, p. 456).Such approaches are ‘appropriate in order to get information about simple rela-tively fixed issues, where the meaning can be standardized and quantified’, but not‘more complex issues . . . [such as leadership, which] cannot be translated intoabstract, standardized forms and language’ (Alvesson, 1996, p. 461). Instead,process philosophy expresses an historical sense that takes a particular period,encounter, issue, or situation, rather than familiar behaviour patterns, attitudes, ortraits, as its focus.

Practically speaking this means attending to the withdrawn or backgroundprocesses of individuation. This type of mise en scène implies the deployment of aqualitative, interpretive and ethnographic research strategy, with a strong ‘situa-tional’ focus (Alvesson, 1996). Such an approach seeks to emphasize the degreeand form of permeability of leadership and the process of its articulation.Research questions will emphasize the ambiguous and the precarious quality ofleadership as a moving synthesis of differences and acknowledge the selective roleof social/institutional norms and their constraints: of variations and contingen-cies in accounts. The focus is on leadership in an event setting, constituted lesshere than now and less in space than in time, so avoiding the pathological dis-tinction leaving leaders ‘out there’. What is interesting, from a process studies per-spective, is to investigate how perpetual movement and divergent processes forma discrete body, or appear to obtain in a substantial set of individual qualities andcapabilities, at the same time as preserving the uninterrupted continuity of ourexperience.

CONCLUSION: LEADERSHIP AS PROCESS

Process studies provide a clear demonstration that ‘successful leaders’ are notsimple, locatable social actors, nor are they the completion of an operation of indi-viduation. An apparent individuality is construed as a selective abstraction fromthe vast field of experience. This selective process is prevalent because leaders tendto immerse themselves in a misleading Western ‘substance metaphysic’. They havedone this by having certain ascendant characteristics ascribed: I am a visionary, Icommunicate well, I encourage participation, I build teams, I am clear what needs



to be achieved, and so on. The view of the individual social actor is epitomizedby the prefix ‘I’ in these statements. We should not adduce any categorical dis-tinction, however, between ‘leaders’ and their ‘environments’. When viewed inprocess terms, absolutely distinct individuality becomes problematic. What isprimary is leadership as process, an internal qualitative relation expressing differ-ence in-itself, without mediation or relation to external others.

Deleuze and Guattari (1987) introduce the term ‘involution’ to express a relax-ation of natural, obvious and reified forms and the corresponding emergence ofa complex field of heterogeneous combinations and novel alliances, which cutacross and beneath seemingly independent social actors. Such aggregations are anon-localizable synthesis of differences recognizing the continual participation ofconstituent parts within each other. The notion of leadership does not, therefore,refer specifically or exclusively to the transformational, charismatic or visionaryfigure of transcendent leaders, nor does it focus entirely on the behaviour of fol-lowers, or the discrete relations between one and the other, which leave the rela-tions external to each. The emphasis on emergence and becoming rather than sheerexistence or being connotes the excessive movement through which leadershipfrees itself from association with a ‘thing’ moving. Instead, leadership is movement,open and dynamic process, whose complete determination ‘does not follow fromits possibility of becoming present. At best, it appears only in the most fleetingmoments, when it does not even seem to have taken place’ (Widder, 2002, p. 59).

In conclusion, management studies, as a body of knowledge and understand-ing, faces the pressing problem of raising the status and bringing to bear new andimaginative ways of thinking about leadership, so as to gain new conceptual lever-age. Researchers, for the most part, have not drawn out the full implications ofBryman’s (1986) call for engagement with ideas from different enquiry paradigms.The current discussion has sought to extend our understanding of leadership asa creative process of becoming. The pressing methodological difficulty now is refin-ing ways of researching the internal milieu adequate for the removal of the indi-vidual social actor as a causa sui without destroying its complexity and theleadership on which it depends. This complexity must be recognized, however, ifwe are to avoid the fallacy of misplaced leadership.

NOTE

*I would like to express my appreciation to Professor Peter Case, Dr Keith Robinson, Dr Ceri Brown,Andre Spicer, Deborah Williamson, and the three anonymous Journal of Management Studies review-ers, for their insightful comments and critical engagement with earlier drafts of this article.

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The Fallacy of Misplaced Leadership